DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Now, some houses just sit there on their lot, minding their business. And then there are houses that seem to carry the whole weight of a life — and a city — right there in their limestone walls.
The George W. Sampson Home is one of those. George W.
Sampson came into this world in 1825 and left it in 1888, and in between he managed to pack in quite a story. He was a Confederate Army Captain, and after the war he became one of Austin's leading merchants — the kind of man a city gets built around, whether it means to or not. Now, in 1872, Sampson married a woman named Mary Goodwin Hall, born in 1845.
And here's where the story takes a turn that makes you set down your coffee. Mary was the niece of Governor Edmund J. Davis.
And their wedding — that wedding in 1872 — was the very first wedding ever held in the Governor's Mansion. The first. You can imagine the occasion.
The chandeliers, the guests, the weight of history that nobody quite knew they were making yet. Three years after that wedding, in 1875, the Sampsons built this house. Native limestone, every block of it hand-cut right there at the site.
This wasn't stone hauled in from somewhere else — it came straight out of the ground it sits on. And inside that house, they installed what was possibly Austin's first complete indoor plumbing system, fed by a cistern that collected rainwater right off the roof. Possibly the first.
That word 'possibly' is doing a lot of work, but even the possibility is something. Decades passed, as they do, and sometime in the nineteen twenties, somebody added a gallery with Corinthian columns out front — that grand, columned porch that gives the place the bearing of a house that knows exactly what it is. A Confederate captain.
A merchant. A Governor's niece. The first wedding in the Mansion.
Limestone cut by hand. And maybe — just maybe — the first indoor plumbing in the whole city. Some houses, friend, have earned their walls.
What the marker says
Former confederate Army Captain and leading Austin merchant George W.Sampson (1825-88), Married Mary Goodwin Hall (b.1845), niece of Gov. Edmund J. Davis. Their wedding in 1872 was the first held in the Governor's Mansion. In 1875 the Sampson built this house of native limestone, hand-cut at the site. A cistern stored rainwater for what was possibly Austin's first complete indoor plumbing system. The gallery with Corinthian columns was added in the 1920's. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1982.