The Waldo Mansion

The railroad promoter this plaque names as Mary Waldo's father reached Houston in 1838. Abram Morris Gentry, an Indiana-born merchant, helped win the 1859 charter of the Texas and New Orleans Railroad and served in the Confederate supply and commissary department. He twice represented Harris County in the state Senate. After the war he lived much of the time in New York and on Long Island, yet financed the Texas Western Narrow Gauge from Houston after its 1875 charter. He died at Huntington in 1883. The house is a private residence.

What the plaque says

The Waldo Mansion A Confederate veteran, J. P. Waldo (1839-1896) settled in Houston after the Civil War. He married Mary Virginia Gentry (1849-1922), daughter of railroad promoter Abram Gentry. Waldo soon became a prosperous railroad executive. In 1885 he built this house at the corner of Rusk and Caroline (2 mi. N). A Mansard roof and tower originally topped the mansion. Elegant millwork adorns the interior. In 1905 Waldo's son Wilmer (1876-1962) moved the house to this site, then a fashionable area on the edge of town. He rebuilt it without most of its Victorian detailing. The Waldo family lived here until 1966. (1978)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Buffalo Soldiers National Museum — 0.5 mi
  A museum in Houston's 1925 Light Guard Armory that tells the service of Black soldiers from the Revolutionary War onward, built from one veteran's thirty years of collecting.
• Rothko Chapel — 0.7 mi
  An octagonal chapel open to all faiths, built by the de Menils around fourteen dark canvases by Mark Rothko, with Barnett Newman's Broken Obelisk standing in the pool outside.
• The Menil Collection — 0.8 mi
  John and Dominique de Menil's free museum in Montrose: a grey-sided Renzo Piano building among bungalows, holding antiquities, Surrealism and art of Oceania under natural light.
• Museum of Fine Arts, Houston — 1.1 mi
  The oldest art museum in Texas, grown from a 1900 schoolroom art league into a campus of Watkin, Mies van der Rohe and later buildings, with Ima Hogg's Bayou Bend up the bayou.

More markers nearby

• Louis Wiltz Kemp — steps away
• The Blue Bird Circle — 0.2 mi
• Courtlandt Place — 0.3 mi
• South Main Baptist Church — 0.3 mi