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Ezekiel W. Cullen House

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1839, Augustus Phelps; later additions; 1952 restored, Raiford Stripling. 205 S. Congress Ave.

Phelps’s third house, built in 1839, has a Greek temple front as the dominant feature. The large, one-story house has three rooms on each side of a central hall and a front-facing gable, rather than the more typical end gable. The front gable is elaborated as a pediment with an entablature and is supported by four unevenly spaced Greek Doric columns. The pediment and entablature are proportionate to the width, but not to the building’s height, so the columns appear disproportionally short. Behind the pediment, with its operable fan window, a ballroom extends the entire length of the house. Small dormers and a north wing are later additions. Phelps’s trademark five-pointed stars, some inverted and small ones in a row, are not connected to gutters or downspouts, as he usually placed them, but are at the front corners of the portico, seemingly as ornament.

Ezekiel Wimberly Cullen came from Georgia in 1835 and established a law practice in San Augustine. His grandson, oilman and philanthropist Hugh Roy Cullen, engaged Raiford Stripling to restore the house in 1952, which he donated in 1953 to the Ezekiel Cullen Chapter of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, which maintains the house museum and its collections.

Writing Credits

Author: 
Gerald Moorhead et al.
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Citation

Gerald Moorhead et al., "Ezekiel W. Cullen House", [San Augustine, Texas], SAH Archipedia, eds. Gabrielle Esperdy and Karen Kingsley, Charlottesville: UVaP, 2012—, http://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/TX-02-LC54.

Print Source

Buildings of Texas

Buildings of Texas: East, North Central, Panhandle and South Plains, and West, Gerald Moorhead and contributors. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2019, 57-57.

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