Texas People, Texas Places: More Musings of the Rambling Boy

36. Snooping Around Historic Houses

✥ 36 ✥ Snooping Around Historic Houses Ih av e always been a fan of historic houses, perhaps because I am a born snoop. It is very difficult for me to pass a sign that says “Historic Smedley Jones House, 1840” without stopping to see what kind of stuff the Smedley Joneses had. There are about five thousand historic houses in the United States and sometimes I feel as though I have been in at least half of them. I discovered early on that there are two kinds of historic houses . I think of them as layered houses and instant houses. Not all layered houses are open to the public. I have a cousin in Austin, a maiden lady in her eighties, who lives in a layered house. It is a big yellow brick house with white columns, built by her grandfather in the 1870s, and everything that was ever brought through the front door is still in it, including two sets of horsehair-covered parlor furniture that were wedding presents given to her grandparents shortly after the Civil War. Also in that parlor is a Gothic table radio from the 1930s, a cabinet hi-fi set from the ’50s, and a color TV. Hanging on the wall in the hallway is a framed photograph of her great-grandfather in his Confederate uniform, with the bloodstained sash he was wearing when he was wounded at Gettysburg draped over the frame. Next to the photograph are some ceramic plaques depicting ballet dancers that my cousin made when she was a little girl. Those are layers of history, and there is something very immediate and moving about them. Not far from my cousin’s house is a historic house called the French Legation, which is open to the public. It was built in the 142 ✥ 1840s, when Austin was the capital of the Republic of Texas, and it may have been for a few months the residence of an old fraud who called himself Count Jean Pierre Dubois de Saligny, although he was neither a count nor named Saligny. He was, however , the French minister to the Republic of Texas, and for that reason the house was restored in the 1950s by the Daughters of the Republic of Texas and opened to the public as the French Legation Museum. The DRT ladies put together a fine collection of furniture from the 1840s and created an open-hearth kitchen with more brass and copper in it than you would find in a brass foundry, but the whole thing has a glossy look about it that simply does not ring true. It has no continuity. It is a stage set, an instant house. My favorite layered house is in Washington, DC, and it is open to the public. Tudor Place was built in 1805 by Thomas Peter and his wife, Martha Custis Peter, who was Martha Washington’s granddaughter. It was occupied by six generations of the Peter family and, as they say, stuff piled up. Like a lot of layered houses, it had one owner who lived there a long, long time and never changed anything. One of Thomas and Martha Peter’s daughters, Britannia Peter Kennon (she had a sister named America), was born in the house in 1815. She was married in 1842, was widowed fourteen months later, and returned to Tudor Place to spend the rest of her life there. During the Civil War she saved the house from confiscation as a hospital by renting rooms to influential Union army officers—even though she was Robert E. Lee’s cousin. She died in 1911, a day short of her ninety-sixth birthday. I was in the house shortly after the last owner, Armistead Peter III, died in 1983. It was stuffed with three centuries worth of furniture . In Armistead Peter’s study there was a massive partners’ desk from the 1880s, which Peter used daily, but pushed against the west wall was an eighteenth-century secretary desk that might have ✥ 143 been at Mount Vernon. On Peter’s desk was a telephone from the 1960s, but it was wired into an outlet in the ceiling that was attached to an electric chandelier that was installed about 1890. In the garage was a 1919 Pierce-Arrow roadster with a rumble seat, which Peter drove around Washington until the 1970s. Tudor Place is a historic house with innumerable layers. But you don...