Inside Texas: Culture, Identity and Houses, 1878–1920

10. Houses of Many Rooms: Multiple Identities

______JlltID______ Houses of Many Rooms MULTIPLE IDENTITIES liP'H R 0 UGH the decoration of their homes, people L expressed their identity as residents of a region and as members of families, various social and ethnic groups, and economic classes. In many cases such identification was visible throughout a room and occasionally through several rooms. And while other identities may be alluded to in some spaces, they are generally subthemes. But only in images of several rooms in the same house do rooms express an assortment of identities that reflect the way a household defined itself for friends, relatives, and even family members. Some of the following rooms were photographed at the same time; other images were taken at various intervals from 1896 to 1920. In both cases - within any period of time, range of styles, or geographical area - the houses illustrate how families fashioned different spaces in personally expressive ways and thus made their homes distinctive . Consider first the Waco residence of Gregor and Annie McGregor (figs. ro. I, ro.2, ro.3). Born of immigrant Scottish parents in North Carolina, McGregor had moved to Texas after his 1852 graduation from medical school at New York University; he founded a small colony whose members, mostly his Scottish North Carolinian relatives, settled across Washington and Austin counties during the next eight years. In 1859, McGregor married Annie Portia Fordtran, daughter of a pioneer German emigrant and Austin colonist, Charles Fordtran, who was one of the largest landowners in the county. McGregor, too, had prospered - both as a physician and as a land speculator. He purchased big tracts of land in Washington, Austin, and Fayette counties, subdivided them, and then sold parcels to Germans and Czechs who were arriving in large numbers at that time. I When McGregor gave up his medical practice in 1872, he and his family moved to Waco, where he continued to 223 Inside Texas 224 10.2. Sitting room, Gregor Carmichael McGregor house, 1896 (Courtesy William M. and Frances P. Harris). manage his land interests. 2 In 1873 he built an Italianate residence. Its interior was photographed twenty-three years later as the McGregors introduced their new daughter -in-Iaw, Mrs. Will (Irene) McGregor, into Waco society . As the local newspaper announced, "a handsome young bride was to be ushered into matrondom, and her welcome was to be greeted in no commonplace way." More than 300 guests were formally received in the parlor where the florist's smilax formed scarf draperies for every window, caught in graceful festoons by American Beauty buds. The piece de resistance here was an artist 's triumph in a magnificent jardiniere, [?]y over- flowing with the Beauty roses. The smile of the American Beauty, the queen among flowers, and the American woman the queen among women, was never better illustrated than in the handsome group that surrounded the hostess. 3 The "piece de resistance" is the jardiniere highlighted in figure 10. I at the center of the piano top. The jardiniere itself is painted with a rose motif that is echoed around the room in stencil-decorated panels. The equation of flowers and women was not just the product of the imagination of the Waco newspaper reporter ; in nineteenth-century America, flowers, part of the sentimental culture, were the province of women. Women nurtured flowers, and in so doing, embodied the virtues inherent in "womanhood." As if to mark a feminine domain, flowers provided motifs for carpeting and wallpaper mills that produced countless floral patterns for room decoration. In Annie McGregor's parlor, for example , flowers define floor, walls, and ceramics. Floral themes also embellish the elaborately draped scarf that renders the piano exclusively decorative because the hostess had arranged for that day to have "music [steal] down the stairway from an unseen source." In a corner of this feminine room is a copy of The Greek Slave, originally sculpted life size by Hiram Powers. This sculpture, which Henry James remarked was "so undressed , yet so refined," inspired countless casts that found their way into homes across the country, renewing the legitimacy of the nude as a vehicle of artistic expression . 4 A recent art historian has said that during the late nineteenth century "no house was really properly and tastefully furnished without at least a little bisque version of the statue.,,5 Amid these and other images of womanhood gracing the parlor, a painting of Robert E. Lee...