Vintage Cottage

Trail
Type
Building
Date
late 1870s
Address
508 4th St.
Blanco, TX
Names
Brown-Cox House

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The Brown-Cox house was built probably in the late 1870s for John W. and Emma Hamilton as the Hamilton Hotel and Livery Stables just east of the present location, near Main Street, which was then a dirt road. The stables were at the extreme west side of the block. The complex also served as a stage stop for the Fredericksburg and Austin lines. In fact, a stage driver gave the alarm for the disastrous fire of August 13, 1876, that destroyed the county’s first courthouse located a block away on the south side of the square.

A widow, Catherine Wright Gillespie Brown, bought the property from the Hamiltons in 1891 for $950. Brown ultimately had six children and was widowed a second time. Around 1900, the house was sold to P. M. and Elizabeth Cox, who moved into town from a ranch about that time. Their daughter inherited the house and lived there until the 1930s.

In 1932 the house was moved 200 feet west to its present location to make room for a Sinclair service station on the corner of 4th and Main. In recent memory, the house has been a flower shop, bed and breakfast, and now an office. If walls could talk, they could tell quite a story.

This one-story frame dwelling, one of the oldest remaining in Blanco, is important not only for its venerable age and history but as the only house with still largely intact Greek Revival influence despite some modifications made in recent years.