Wharton lawyer Wilie J. Croom was county judge of Wharton County when Heiner's courthouse was built. Croom and his wife, Lida Dennis, the granddaughter of Wharton County's most illustrious early political figure, Albert Clinton Horton, who was the first lieutenant governor of Texas after it achieved statehood, built their two-story wooden house. Of moderate size when compared to the grand houses Heiner designed along Main Street in Houston, the Croom House is one of the largest late-nineteenth-century houses remaining in Wharton. Its composition is unusual, with a slender tower emerging hesitantly from the southeast corner of the L-front house. Now stationed on the Croom House site is a one-story, board-and-batten shotgun cottage at 209 E. Milam Street.
The U.S. Post Office of 1936 by Louis A. Simon, Supervising Architect of the U.S. Treasury, at 141 E. Milam Street, is a dignified, symmetrical, one-story building faced with buff brick and limestone. On the block north of the Croom House at 209 E. Caney Avenue is the former town house of Wharton County planter Gerard A. Harrison of 1907, one of a number of imposing bungalow-type houses in Wharton.