Those familiar with Houston history may be able to tell you that the oldest house in the city still standing on its original property is the 1847 Kellum-Noble House in Sam Houston Park. Although owned by the City, The Heritage Society (THS), a non-profit organization, has maintained the home for the past sixty-five years. Recently, […]
Archive | Preservation
Gravestones Tell Stories: San Isidro Cemetery
By Marie-Theresa Hernandez Photo by Myra de la Garza, Tree as Protector Long before Sugar Land was an affluent suburb of Houston, it was known as the home of Imperial Sugar. The company produced and imported sugar cane and processed it in a red brick, six-story building that still stands alongside U.S. Highway 90. Imperial Sugar initially […]
Houston Area Rainbow Collective History Community-led Archives
Just over a decade ago Houston Public Library’s Jo Collier brought together a group of local lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community historians,archivists, and scholars as part of the library’s LGBT speaker series. Recognizing commonalities and opportunities in their diverse organizations and programs, the group formed Houston Area Rainbow Collective History (ARCH) as a […]
Seeing Houston From the Bottom Up: Using Archeology and Archives to Reconstruct a Forgotten Houston Neighborhood
By Jason W. Barrett, Douglas K. Boyd, and Louis F. Aulbach Houston is a dynamic city with an amazing history. The stories written about its past, however, generally focus on the important people and big events that transformed the wilderness along Buffalo Bayou into a modern metropolis. The Allen brothers, steamship and railroad commerce, […]
Building on Intellectual Foundations: Creating the African American Library at the Gregory School
On September 2, 2002 a group of city officials and Houston’s then-mayor, Lee P. Brown, solidified the fate of an abandoned brick building at 1300 Victor Street in Freedmen’s Town Historic District. Through a significant restoration effort, Fourth Ward’s late-1920s-era African-American elementary school, vacant since 1984, was to become a dual-purpose cultural center and research […]
Minette Boesel: Houston’s Preservation & Adaptive Reuse Advocate
By Silvia Celeste Martinez What is the current building trend in Houston? Adaptive reuse of buildings has become increasingly popular in an effort to preserve existing structures and simultaneously adapt their function to their communities’ needs. Since preservation activist Minnette Boesel wrote “Historic Preservation in Houston… a History?” which appeared in The Houston Review of […]
Clayton House: Profile of a Home and the Family who Built It
By Alex Colvin In 2006, a $6.8 million private-public funding project formed to restore and renovate the aging Georgian Revival-style Clayton House in the Houston Museum District. Today the structure serves as a library and meeting space for the Houston Public Library’s Clayton Library Center for Genealogical Research. Visitors to the home are immediately struck […]
Houston: Becoming the Ranch House City
Houston is a vast city that spreads to the horizon in all directions. Gleaming commercial districts punctuate its sprawl, but the landscape is a blanket of residential neighborhoods. They define its architectural character. They tell us how and when the city grew.
A Round Trip back to Houston
Who would have ever thought that a valise thrown onto burning trash heap outside a house being torn down in Houston would be rescued by an unsuspecting passerby and turn out to hold a historic collection of nineteenth century photographs? Well, it happened, and this is the story!
Quality Hill, Houston’s First Elite Neighborhood
By Sidonie Sturrock Sometimes the quest to find historical information becomes a story in itself, revealing a different history than expected. My research on Houston’s Quality Hill neighborhood began thanks to hints left in unlikely places: two turn-of-the-twentieth-century houses next to Minute Maid Park downtown (a strange juxtaposition visible from Highway 59) and the words “Quality Hill” and “Houston’s […]