Garrow House

Duane's take

Here's how the marker tells it, and here's how I'm gonna tell it to you. Somewhere in Houston, in a neighborhood that was built to impress from the very first brick, there stands a house with a story worth slowing down for. The Garrow House.

And if you know anything about cotton money in the early twentieth century, you already know this kind of story starts with ambition. John W. Garrow was born in 1879, and by the time 1913 rolled around, he was a successful cotton broker with a family to house and, apparently, a taste for doing things right.

So he hired Houston architect Birdsall P. Briscoe to design a home in a neighborhood called Courtlandt Place. Exclusive, the marker says.

And that word is doing some real work. This was not just any street. When Garrow moved his family in, their house was only the seventh one built in the whole neighborhood.

The seventh. You can practically feel the fresh paint. Now, Briscoe didn't just draw up four walls and a roof.

The man reached across the Atlantic for inspiration. The Garrow House is an excellent example of Italian Renaissance influence, a style that had been catching fire across the United States somewhere around 1890 and would keep burning all the way to 1935. So right there in Houston, Texas, a cotton broker's family was living inside a piece of that tradition.

The Garrow family stayed in that house, generation to generation, until 1944. The same year John W. Garrow, born 1879, died.

The house and the man, together until the end. That's not drama invented for the road. That's just what the marker says, and sometimes the marker says enough.

What the marker says

John W. Garrow (1879-1944), a successful cotton broker, had this house built in 1913 for his family. Designed by Houston architect Birdsall P. Briscoe, this was the seventh house built in the exclusive Courtlandt Place neighborhood. The house is an excellent example of Italian renaissance influence, a style popular in the United States between 1890 and 1935. Garrow family members lived in the house until 1944. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1997