Gold-Grobe House

Duane's take

The way the marker tells it, here's the story of the Gold-Grobe House in Gillespie County. Peter Gold, Sr. built this place in 1902. Limestone, solid and true, the way the Hill Country demanded it.

One story, center passage plan, the kind of layout that made good sense in a Texas summer. Simple. Purposeful.

Squared away. But the story doesn't end with Peter Gold. Friedrich William Grobe bought the house in 1914, and if you know anything about a man who is simultaneously a blacksmith, a surveyor, a farmer, AND a postmaster, you know he is not a man who leaves well enough alone.

Two years after he bought it, in 1916, Grobe went to work. He added a second floor and a rear wing, and here is the part worth savoring: those new sections weren't built from the same native limestone as the original. Grobe used concrete blocks, manufactured right down the road at the Basse Brothers Cement Yard.

Local materials, local labor, local ambition. Grobe himself was a descendant of Fredericksburg pioneers, a man rooted deep in this Hill Country soil, and he served as postmaster of the nearby town of Rheingold. So you've got one house that started as one man's plain limestone vision in 1902, and by 1916 it had grown upward and outward, wearing two different building materials like a testament to two different eras.

That's the Gold-Grobe House. Still standing, still telling it.

What the marker says

Built in 1902 by Peter Gold, Sr., this house was originally a one-story center passage plan structure constructed of native limestone. Friedrich William Grobe bought the house in 1914. In 1916 he added a second floor and rear wing using concrete blocks manufactured by the local Basse Brothers Cement Yard. A descendant of Fredericksburg pioneers, Grobe was a blacksmith, surveyor, and farmer, and served as postmaster of the nearby town of Rheingold. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1989