Henry T. Phelps of San Antonio designed this two-story house for banker and civic leader Samuel Pruitt Simpson Jr., who came to Eagle Pass from Lexington, Kentucky. Phelps’s Craftsman version of half-timbering, visible in the Simpson House’s front gable, is grafted onto a conservative plan with a wraparound gallery oriented to the prevailing southeast breeze.
During the second decade of the twentieth century Ceylon Street emerged as the preferred residential street for Eagle Pass’s merchant and rancher elite. Buff brick two-story houses with porticos and galleries display the impact of San Antonio’s architecture in Eagle Pass as well as throughout San Antonio’s market territory in South and West Texas. The columned Colonial Revival Joseph DeBona House (1911; 619 Ceylon), the substantial raised bungalows at numbers 671 and 693, and the two-story Colonial Revival house at number 721 echo early-twentieth-century house types in San Antonio. But Ceylon Street’s architectural standout at number 645 (identified as the Mexican Consulate in the 1916 Sanborn map) departs from these models. The elaborate rose-colored, one-story, stucco-faced brick house is festooned with decoration and is far more exuberant than its sober neighbors.