When the area north of downtown was donated for the new university, it was named Washington Square. Starting in the 1880s, to raise money for the school, land south of Arnold Street and east of N. Mound Street was sold, becoming prime locations for the houses of the town’s elite families. Rulfs’s first houses in the area were on N. Church Street, soon followed by those on N. Mound Street, where nearly all of the extant houses on the 100–600 blocks were designed by him between 1890 and 1921.
It is overly simplistic to classify Rulfs’s Blount House as Queen Anne, although its general character of porches, gables, and ornate woodwork are consistent with the style. However, houses like this reflect the architect’s responsiveness to the particular needs of a client rather than simply adhering to a fashionable pattern book. Rulfs returned to the model he developed for the Roland Jones House (LC39), where the first floor is planned with spacious interconnecting rooms for entertaining. The central cubic block has a tall, pyramidal roof and a projecting front bay with second-floor Palladian windows. Similar smaller windows are in the gable and dormers. A two-level gallery along the front curves to run along the south wall. The architect’s brother, William Henry, a master carpenter, regarded this porch as the best work of his career, displaying subtle spindlework, dropped finials, bracketed arches, and segmented and pointed arches. The south porch faced Mary Price Blount’s elaborate garden (now occupied by a brick apartment house).
Stephen W. Blount Jr. moved to Nacogdoches from San Augustine in the 1890s, where his father Stephen W. Blount (see LC51) had settled in 1835. Active in managing the family’s land holdings, Blount was a lawyer and state legislator, appointed by the governor to the Historical Board that evolved into the Texas Historical Commission.
The house’s current owners have been gradually restoring it since 2010.
At 408 N. Mound, the Tolbert B. Hardeman House (1899, Diedrich Rulfs) has similar massing to the Blount House, but nearly all its Queen Anne trim its gone. The Palladian window in the front gable reveals this design’s transition to a classical style.