America 250 One Nation Under Roofs
This is the title of our new exhibit in Villa Finale Museum & Gardens Mathis Gallery building, which features items from the permanent collection that relate to the history of the United States. As the nation attempts to meet this milestone, our museum, under the direction of Curator Sylvia Gonzalez-Pizaña, has pulled both fine art and patriotic artifacts from the house. Some of my favorites include a collection of memorabilia from the Centennial Exposition held in Philadelphia in 1876. It is nice to view these items – normally arrayed on the second floor of the house – with more room to breathe and be seen.
There are also artifacts from the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis and 19C Stafforshire flatback porcelains that purport to be Abraham Lincoln and George Washington. They look a bit more like Prince Albert and Benjamin Franklin, but hey.
The founder of our museum, Walter Mathis, was a genuine World War 11 hero, flying 65 missions in the European theater – primarily B-25s, and earning a series of medals, some of which are on display in the gallery and some of which are still on display in the house. He also collected Currier prints of the Mexican War 1846-48, some of which are now on display in our America 250 exhibit, along with examples of his excellent collection of early maps of New Spain, Mexico and Texas.
Not all of the artifacts are antique – Among a collection of busts of U S Presidents is one of Abraham Lincoln from the 1970s – manufactured by Avon to contain aftershave!
One item I encouraged Sylvia to include was a signed portrait of William Howard Taft, the only person to serve as both US President and Supreme Court Justice. It is a family heirloom given to Walter Mathis’ grandfather who founded the Coleman Pasture Company along with the Taft family. Taft’s brother had a ranch house called La Quinta where the President stayed in 1909. The photo of Taft was signed in 1924 when Walter Mathis’ aunt was wife of the La Quinta superintendent.
Some of my favorite artworks from the collection are also in the Mathis Gallery for the America 250 show, including the stunning Julian Onderdonk painting of Matagorda Bay, which is my favorite of the several Onderdonks in the collection. My top favorite artist is Mary Bonner, and some of her amazing graphic prints are visible in the show. She had a knack for creating dynamic motion out of line and contour that reminds me of Windsor McCay among others.
You can tour the exhibit for FREE during normal hours (10-4 Tuesday-Saturday) and also of course see “the rest of the story” in the museum for the price of admission. Or, if you are a Friend of Villa Finale, the house is free! While 250 years is no Han Dynasty or Roman Empire, it is still a major achievement, and it might go on even longer!
Authenticity after 60 years
In my investigations over the last 15 years into the limitations of the National Register of Historic Places I often suggested the use of “authenticity” instead of “integrity” in judging whether a property qualified for listing. In creating the National Register in 1966, U.S. heritage experts had chosen to go with “integrity” instead of “authenticity” which was more common internationally. Integrity is more mechanistic, and defined by architecture, which makes sense given the heavy influence of architectural practice on the U.S. preservation movement from the 1930s through 1960s. In dealing with the broader range of heritage sites in the 2000s, I thought deferring to “authenticity” could help address the diversity deficit in the National Register of Historic Places. You can see my 2016 blog about integrity and authenticity here.
Now that we are more than 60 years removed from the Venice Charter of 1964, it is interesting to note that “authenticity” has itself undergone a transformation away from a formalistic architectural definition and toward ideas of heritage as defined by the communities who steward them. To quote from the most recent World Heritage discussion of authenticity:
“Over time, the understanding of authenticity has undergone significant evolution from a
material-based notion to a pluralistic, functional, traditional, spiritual, intangible, culturally
relative and value-based concept, reflecting the diversity of human societies, the different
ways in which heritage is created, used, and remembered, as well as reflecting the
evolution of the notion of heritage.” Authenticity in the context of the World Heritage Convention: Evolution and Impact, 25th Session of the General Assembly of States Parties to the Convention concerning the protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage, November 2025.
This is similar to what I have been saying in presentations and book chapters since 2010: Heritage conservation is a four-step process of Identifying, Evaluating, Registering and Treating historic resources. Heritage conservation happens when a community determines what elements of its past it wants in its future. As noted in the Burra Charter, the community whose heritage is being conserved needs to be involved in each step of the process – Identification, Evaluation, Registration and Treatment. If we bring community into the process too late, or if we assume as professionals that we are better qualified to Evaluate or determine Treatments, we will come up short. How you conserve Mount Taylor and how you conserve a Victorian house museum are not equivalent.
Mount Taylor, NM last month.
Villa Finale, the month before
Authenticity received its first definitional challenge about 1980, just a few years after the operational guidelines for World Heritage were established, following Western architecture-based practice that focused on design, materials, workmanship and setting. That challenge was Warsaw, Poland, completely rebuilt after World War II thanks to precise documentation done forty years earlier. The materials and workmanship were not authentic. But it was extremely important to the community. The next challenge came in 1992 when Japan brought with it an understanding of the integrity of process, rather than product. The Shinto temple is a thousand years old even as it is rebuilt from scratch every twenty years, because the tools and craftsmanship are one thousand years old.
Meanwhile in the West, we see no problem restoring an 18th century house with epoxy, nail guns and other tools and techniques that did not exist at the time, because we revere the object more than the process.
The shift toward a more holistic – and genuinely international – approach began with the Nara Document on Authenticity in 1994. To the original four aspects of authenticity were added form, substance, use and function, traditions and techniques, location, and spirit and feeling. The key idea was that authenticity had to be defined within a cultural context. And while that definition is not universal, the process – Identify, Evaluate, Register and Treat – is.
Another 30 years has passed, and authenticity has continued to evolve. By the 2000 expert meeting at the Great Zimbabwe, authenticity was linked explicitly to living traditions, stewardship and ritual. Many cultures do not place as high a value on material remains as they do on speech, memory and community values. In May of this year, the International Conference on Cultural Heritage in Africa: A Dialogue on the
Concept of Authenticity was held in Nairobi, Kenya discussed how African heritage is dynamic, community-centered, and deeply rooted in both tangible and intangible values. A similar discussion is planned for Southeast Asia.
The other problem, as you might imagine, is that “authenticity’ has no equivalent in Japanese, Arabic and certain African languages. Different societies conceive of continuity, value, trust and authority in different ways. As the document notes, the challenge may be existential: How do you ask for proof of Outstanding Universal Value if values are culture-based and not universal?
When the history of a site includes preservation
The School of Architecture and Planning at UT San Antonio hosted a colloquium last weekend that began with a keynote by Davide Galleri, PhD of the University of Naples, who spoke about Robie House, the epitome of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie Style and a building I have long known. Indeed, the black and white photo he used of the 58th Street face of the house was the view out my dorm window in 1979-80.
This one is from 2008 after they had torn down my Eero Saarinen-designed dorm.
Galleri’s history of Robie House revealed an interesting conundrum. Most of the house’s history is not about a house as much as a site of landmark preservation. The original owners were there less than two years, and the two subsequent homeowners were gone by the time the building was 30 years old. Like every building in history, it was first proposed to be demolished when it was about 30 years old, in 1941. Preservation pressure kept it alive under institutional ownership until it was threatened again in 1957, when Wright himself argued for it. It was purchased and saved by the same guy who was doing the urban renewal of Hyde Park and demolishing 1000 acres of buildings. It then limped along under the ownership of the University of Chicago for a couple decades before becoming a proper house museum. So, of its 115 years of history, arguably 85 of those years are the history of preservation.
And they still haven’t got the dining room set back.
The more I think about it, this is not unusual. Every building faces its first demolition threat or need for a major overhaul at about 30-40 years. That is when a preponderance of building systems from roofs on down will need to be replaced or trashed. It is normal for most of a building’s history to be about preserving, rehabilitating or retrofitting it. Right now the “Thompson Center” in Chicago is being completely redone exactly 40 years after it was built.
I did not realize until Galleri’s lecture that Robie House faced its first demolition threat in 1941. I always knew about the 1957 battle, since it coincided with the beginnings of the battle over Penn Station in New York, which was the exact same age as Robie House. Even though it looked different.
Heck, when you think about it some more, you realize that the inscription on one of the most famous landmarks of the Western world is all about how it was restored by Marcus Agrippa.
I took this photo 43 years ago, so, like, there is even more preservation history now.
My new place of work, Villa Finale Museum and Gardens in King William, follows this pattern as well. Built in 1876, it was expanded until about 1902, and then enjoyed about 20 more years of being a fancy house, a decade as a slightly bawdy house, and then joined its neighbors at the age of about 65 in being chopped up into a bunch of apartments during the postwar housing shortage. When Walter Nold Mathis bought and restored it in 1967, he was kicking off the restoration of many other houses in King William that had also been chopped up. For almost 60 years this has been a preservation story, and for the last 15 that story is being told to the public each day.
2010.
My favorite example is just two doors down from Villa Finale – James Reily Gordon’s stunning Romanesque Kalteyer House.
Go back to the 1970s and it looked like this.
Now, Galleri and some of the other academics there on Friday night started getting into the questions of how things are preserved and how they are changed, and whether something can be considered authentic or original. Galleri got into the discussion of integrity, which in my experience has caused a lot of trouble and provided little advantage. See my take on these issues and how they have excluded important landmarks here. I also scribbled down “Ditch period of significance” because what is the period of significance? The original construction? Or is is one step back and the original design before it was modified during construction? And who did the modification – was it the architect? And exactly how many angels will fit on the head of a pin?
Loading the angels…..
When restoring Colonial Williamsburg in the 1930s, perfectly historic 19th century buildings were scraped because they did not fit into the period of significance. Even 50 years later during the restoration of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Home and Studio they destroyed work Wright actually did in 1911 to convert it into apartments, in order to go back to the 1899 appearance. So which is it?
Rather than get into a scholarly debate about originality, design and execution, and the great chasms of authenticity and integrity, I think we need to consider that preservation or rehabilitation is part of the story of every building that makes it past 30-40 years. In fact, I am working on a book that considers many lost Chicago buildings, and it is kind of amazing to see how many architectural wonders bowed out before they turned 50.
Masonic Temple by Burnham and Root
Marshall Field Wholesale Store by Henry Hobson Richardson
Prentice Women’s Hospital, Bertrand Goldberg, 1975.
Culture is – by definition – the tending of things that change over time.
Fast Track
The demolition of the East wing of the White House suddenly brought historic preservation into the mainstream consciousness this week, with valid recriminations from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, American Institute of Architects and other bastions of civil society. Now, many of those knew that, in fact, the executive does not need to follow the same preservation laws as the rest of the country, and while the Advisory Council for Historic Preservation and others opined on a restraining order, the entire 120-year old wing was gone in a week.
That is because they resorted to mechanical demolition with a (rented) backhoe, which makes for the best visuals. Given the executive predilection for reality-TV-style-theatrics above realpolitik, the choice makes sense. It wastes dollars, though, and contradicts modern practice regarding deconstruction and re-use of valuable materials, a topic I covered recently. Clearly, leadership has their broughams mired in the weird 80 years.
The demolition of the Epstein East Wing is a rare moment when historic preservation spends some brief time at the height of national consciousness, and heck, it could continue next week when some western legislator with a bee in his buckskins is holding a hearing on the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966. We might not wish for that, though, because everything that rises up in this performative administration tends to fall and crash just as fast (except prices).
Yes, it is the People’s House, and yes, the approach drew the appropriate rebukes from the bastions of civil society, and yes, at the end of the day there was precious little anyone could do about it. And yes, it is dumb and artless and clumsy and cowardly. They follow the fast track because they can’t do the actual work. The renderings of the oversized replacement building work in the media, even though they don’t work architecturally, as anyone who looks closely can see. But then again, it’s probably just a pretence for rebuilding the underground bunker…..
Photos by me from March tour of WH – except the featured image – you have to guess where that is.
Remember when the buck stopped here? Good times.
DECEMBER UPDATE:
Kudos to the National Trust for Historic Preservation for filing a lawsuit last week against the demolition of the East Wing. Reality stars reign in media fights, but they fold when evidence is required.
Villa Finale Museum and Gardens
Located in the heart of King William – the first historic district in Texas – Villa Finale tells the story of preservation and the story of Walter Mathis, who worked to save more than just architecture. This unique house museum is the result of Mathis’ lifelong commitment to historic preservation, his passion for collecting artworks of a great variety, and his dogged ability to raise up a community and neighborhood from neglect to prominence. I was proud to take the first tour of Villa Finale when it opened to the public in 2010, and I am more than proud to take the helm of this exquisite site in 2025.
If you haven’t visited, we are the only house museum in King William, we have lovely gardens that stretch back to the “Sauerkraut Bend” of the San Antonio River, and we are the stewards of Walter Nold Mathis’ legacy. Mathis was a descendant of Canary Islanders, decorated World War II pilot, and a serial preservationist. He restored Villa Finale in 1967 and then went on to fully or partially restore another 14 homes in King William, which became Texas’ first historic district in 1968.
Walter Mathis was a lifelong collector, and Villa Finale boasts the largest collection of fine arts, books and antiques of any National Trust historic site, with some 12,500 items. My favorites include the Mary Bonner paintings, which I have admired for years.
Walter also collected a wide variety of items related to Napoleon Bonaparte, including an actual death mask and a wide variety of busts and statuary.
The house is open to the public five days a week and you can do either a guided or self-guided tour, which you can learn about here. We also have a great variety of events each month, including a fabulous presentation of iCatrina by Araminta Romero on October 3.
This weekend we are hosting the Texas Spirit Gathering all day Saturday, and upcoming events include an acoustic music evening November 8, a “Merry Friendmas” Christmas party for our members (join here!) and presentation on historic Christmases in King William by Sallie Schuchard Thomas and Maria Pfeiffer with Michaele Thurgood Haynes on December 7. But wait, there’s more – December 11 features a demonstration of our musical machines and then Ken Slavin brings his vocal talents December 12.
I hope to see you soon!
OCTOBER 23 UPDATE
Oh I just had to add a few more images as I begin to become better acquainted with all 12,500 items in our collection.
One of many significant examples of 18th-19th century Cusco school of iconography
School of Canaletto – Venice
Onderdonk bluebonnets. Did you know it is illegal to be a Texas artist unless you paint bluebonnets?
So many helmets…
Luster weibchen. Ja ja, doch, sicher.
Yes they were treacherous in the olden days. Ruling by Imperial Edict.
Disappearing original houses
I was always enamored of the story of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Dana-Thomas house in Springfield, Illinois, built in 1903. In what became a familiar scenario, Susan Lawrence Dana had to wait for her father to pass away before she was able to engage the pioneering architectural innovator. Not only that, but she had to promise to keep the original two-story Italianate house her father had built, including his bedroom fireplace. That fireplace is pretty much all that survived Wright’s restless creativity, as the original house vanished into gabled wings of geometric modernism.
Fun fact – AI can not manage to figure out the other FLW examples of this! So here are some remodelings that Wright did in Oak Park in the first decade of the 20th century, from knowledge.
Hills-DeCaro House 1906. The process of modernizing old houses with ribboned windows and continuous stucco finishes became so popular lots of local Oak Park architects and builders did it.
Young House, Wright redesign 1908 – mostly the wraparound porch creating horizontal emphasis with the Tudor gables still sticking up.
Now in my tenth year in Texas, I am surrounded by examples of houses that swallowed up earlier houses, shifting from simple rock houses and cabins into Victorian extravaganzas. Thanks to Professor Kenneth Hafertepe I now understand better how single-pen rock houses grew into double pens and then added upper levels.
You can see the earlier roofline. This is near Bulverde.
The King William Historic District – the oldest in Texas – is rife with big houses that swallowed up little ones. I was recently quoted regarding the Joske House, which is a masterclass in Renaissance Revival, where no pediment is unbroken, no balustrade unbowed and no basket arch unornamented.
But this was a 1900 remodeling by architect Solon McAdoo of a four-room stone house built in 1881. The famous Villa Finale – the only King William house open for tours – also began as a one-story limestone house in 1876. In 1881 a new owner added a two-story brick wing but the big change came in 1896 with the front porch and tower, which is the bulk of what attracts the eye today.
If you look beyond the porch and tower you can see the earlier houses. This actually happened a lot in King William – on Madison Street you can see several houses that began as a single story of stone and had stories of brick or frame added later, like the Elmendorf house, c. 1885 with a 1917 second story.
There are quite a lot of these on Madison Street, including this Wagenfuhr House, of which there were two and each grew a story later. This one was a one-story German rock house in 1870 that had a frame addition perhaps a generation later. Its neighboring Wagenfuhr house added a nice Victorian second story and can be seen in the featured photo for this blog.
Just down the street the Martin/Van Derlip house started as an 1870 limestone one-story and got a brick second story about 1886, smoothed together with a stucco rendering.
The famous Oge house which looks like a Southern plantation was a one story plus basement home built in 1857 and completely made over by architect Alfred Giles in 1881.
On the first block of King William, you have the Ball houses, which were identical in 1868 but one got a second story about 1904.
Imagine that
I was intrigued by a travel guide to the Hudson River Valley that had this surprising entry: “You pass this on your way to Caramoor and it looks interesting. It’s not, really. The home of John Jay, our first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, it descended through his family through four generations and offers some basically mediocre period furnishings and a rather bizarre ballroom added in this century. Unless you are a John Jay fanatic or a distant relative of the family, this is something you can afford to miss.”
It is the Hudson River Valley, which is crowded with nature and culture, after all.
The guide goes on to share, in a paranthetic paragraph, the letter from someone chiding his dismissive description and noting that the house tells of a great man and also has a Gilbert Stuart and a John Singer Sargent. The author included the critical comment – and did not comment further. So who was right? There is certainly an audience for every house museum. The only question is how big an audience?
There are 11,000 Starbucks in the United States and 14,000 McDonald’s restaurants. Together, that is 10,000 less than the number of museums in the country, which is 35,000. Each Starbucks and McDonald’s has to turn a profit or it will be closed. While the same cold economic logic stands behind each museum, it is deflected by the noble desire to educate and enlighten an audience.
Every story is worth telling. Not every story can be told by an asset that requires $100,000 a year.
The economics of museums can be deflected for years and decades by generous donors or excellent programs or, mostly, by big endowments. The economics of museums, especially house museums, are poor at best, as I have written about here last year and here in 2012 and here in 2008. But the real question of the travel writer above is interpretive – he is basically arguing that other sites have better stories, better artifacts, better architecture.
It’s the Hudson Valley, c’mon! Look at the competition!
There is a problem of too many house museums and there always has been. The problem is not a lack of resources or the depredations of consumer capitalism. The problem is a lack of imagination. If you come across a wonderful old house with a wonderful old story, what is the LEAST imaginative way to save it? Turn it into a house museum. It requires no thought, no creative solution.
But I know the name of that soup tureen! And where to put the fork!
I have taught Preservation Planning for thirty years and my final assignment always asks students to come up with an adaptive re-use of a historic property that would allow it to survive into the future. The only caveat? It can’t be a house museum or a community center.
Damn that’s cold.
Not because those are bad things – they are wonderful things. But they require no thought or imagination. And preservation needs imagination.
Oficina de abogado o dentista, por ejemplo…..
Selling House Museums
The Historic Charleston Foundation has decided to sell the 1808 Nathaniel Russell House, which the Foundation has owned and operated as a house museum since 1955. The news has sparked a backlash from those who want it to stay open to the public. Yet many, including house museum expert Donna Harris, have lauded the Foundation’s decision as a way to bring preservation into the 21st century.
I get it. Last year the San Antonio Conservation Society Foundation sold the 1876 Steves Homestead, which it had owned for 70 years and operated as a house museum. As we removed furniture from the house, someone asked if I was sad that it would not be open to the public. I said: “No, my goal is to preserve buildings. Will it be preserved better by having four people live in it or having 40,000 people tromp through it each year?”
Unlike the Historic Charleston Foundation, the Conservation Society Foundation did not decide to market the house museum we sold. We responded to an unsolicited offer and now it is being returned to its original use as a home. That is in line with #1 of the 10 Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for Rehabilitation, which states that a building should be used for its original purpose. No house museum can, by definition, meet this standard.
That bit of petty legalism aside, it is important to remember the basic facts of house museums over the last twelve decades. First, they lose money. Typically, visitation can cover no more than 20-25% of operating costs. That was true in 1910 and 1930 and 1950 and 1980 and it is still true. William Sumner Appleton was subsidizing 80% of his house museum costs in the 1920s. The Society for the Preservation of Old Dwellings – also in Charleston – learned the pitfalls of the house museum solution in the 1920s and 30s when they bought and saved the Manigault House three times. That’s why Charleston created the first historic district in the United States – because house museums don’t work.
The house museums that thrive make up that 75% operating deficit one of three ways:
- An endowment (Glass House, Gaylord Building, Villa Finale)
- Very high ticket price (Biltmore, Taliesin)
- A gift shop/merch operation that can add a $35 book or handkerchief to every $12 ticket (Frank Lloyd Wright sites).
For the San Antonio Conservation Society Foundation, which has almost a century of its own history to look back upon, we can see that our mission – saving buildings – is not best served by owning everything. We bought Casa Navarro in 1959 and sold it to the state in 1974. We bought the Aztec Theatre in 1988 and sold it to a private owner in 1993. We have bought another dozen buildings in the heart of San Antonio and turned them over to forever owners with a preservation easement on each to insure their long-term conservation. That’s how you do it.
I served many years as Vice Chair of the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s Sites Committee. The Trust was created by Congress in 1949 to receive house museums. But by the early 2000s it was already clear that the house museum model was not functional, as I blogged about in 2008 and 2012. When Stephanie Meeks became National Trust CEO her first question to me was “Would you ever consider selling one of our historic sites?” and my answer was “In a New York minute, if it was better for the preservation of the building.”
Cooper-Molera Adobe, Monterey, California. One of the National Trust Sites we helped evolve from traditional house museum. I blogged about it in 2011 and then again in 2013. 95% of preservation is adaptive re-use and as that 2013 blog explains, new productive uses do not necessarily impede the learning mission of a site. In fact, they can enhance it and bring it to more people.
To quote from my own blog ten years ago: “The only way to preserve something over the long term is to make it useful and productive for its community. Then the community will preserve it sustainably over the long term. There is no amount of money that can save a building forever – none, even if you put it indoors somehow and encase it in amber. Everything deteriorates. The only way to truly save something is to make it vital and central to enough people that they will keep investing in it forever.”
JANUARY UPDATE: Well, the backlash was so strong that HCF reversed its decision. Enough people showed up with enough “investment” of one kind or another. Check back in twenty years.
Ouch – Pleasant Home
I served many years as an advisor for the Pleasant Home Foundation, and recall well when it was established to help preserve this rare 1897 Prairie mansion that is currently included on the list of National Historic Landmarks, that 2% of the most important sits in the nation.
I say “currently” because the building’s owner, the Park District of Oak Park, just ripped out its 125-year old Wisconsin white oak floors (3/4 of an inch thick) to replace them with whatever far inferior product is available in 2023. Other buildings have been removed from National Historic Landmark status for similar destructive behavior. My longtime colleague Steve Kelley discovered it and wrote the following:
“I was walking through Mills Park this morning and noticed the dumpster outside. Being curious, I looked inside and saw most of the first floor wood flooring that was clearly original and authentic cut into pieces filling the dumpster. I went inside and took some photographs and spoke with one of the workers regarding the scope of work for which I did not get a clear answer. I asked the supervisor why the floors were being torn out. He told me it was because they were “old – historic.” In my opinion this is a waste of materials and most likely in violation with state and municipal guidelines for treatment and care of historic properties. The original oak flooring was “old growth” wood that had been harvested from virgin forests in Wisconsin. This wood is far superior to any wood available today. It is not replaceable. The original flooring was in good to fair condition and could’ve easily been refinished for a fraction of the cost that is now being expended.
I am resigning from the Pleasant Home Foundation Board of Trustees and any involvement with the restoration committee effective immediately.I am asking this community what should be our next steps regarding this clear travesty to one of our authentic Oak Park historic landmarks.”
The local newspaper Wednesday Journal covered the controversy well. I think about all of the time I spent there, how careful we were to research and discover the history and materials of the house before we undertook any work, how a bevy of preservation experts were always involved in every decision for years and years. Now this. A National Historic Landmark treated like an amateur Home Depot project.
Twice I gave a lecture there comparing the work of George W. Maher and Frank Lloyd Wright, who had shared office space and who both discovered the new American organic architecture in their own way, Maher arguably achieving it here in 1897, three years before Wright’s first “Prairie” house. It has the horizontal Roman bricks, the flanking urns, the stained glass and overhanging eaves, the flow of one interior space into another and Maher’s own rich rhythm of repeated motifs in every detail
And it used to have real 19th century original growth Wisconsin oak floors.
What. a. gut. punch.
Fachwerkbau
A week ago I joined the Vernacular Architecture Forum’s tour of the Hill Country, and it was replete with fachwerkbau, which is the German word for a type of building construction called half-timbered in English. Basically it is heavy timber joinery infilled in the wall plane with a local masonry material. In the Hill Country, that material is often local limestone.
This Old World technique came naturally to region settled in the mid-19th century by German farmers. Often they might begin, as at the 1856 Faltin House in Comfort, with a log structure, adding fachwerk sections over time.
The Klingelhoeffer House in Fredericksburg was originally built as a fachwerkbau “dogtrot” with a covered open passage between two rooms. The passage was later filled in and more rooms added to the rear.
One amazing little building was this fachwerkbau Chapel in Fredericksburg, which appeared to have been made entirely of extremely unruly curved logs.
A real cool feature here and in another house about a block away were the visible joiner’s marks, which told the builders which pieces of heavy timber fit next to which others. They were generally done in Roman numerals, although with “VIIII” substituting for “IX”!
Here is a view of the whole chapel
Most of these are not generally open, but you can visit the Pioneer Village in Fredericksburg and see the excellent Kammlah House and store, where you are treated to many view of heavy timber and fachwerkbau.
The area also has many of the rock houses, and I have to give props to Baylor’s Kenneth Hafertepe, who wrote the excellent The Material Culture of German Texas, which I wish I had read prior to working on a National Register nomination for one such rock house. They are ubiquitous in the area.
The Tatsch House in Fredericksburg has an amazing large hearth that appears to have been added after initial construction. This is a classic Hill Country “rock house” which often started with a single cubical rock room, with sections added over the years.
