Henry Basse House

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'm gonna give it to you straight. There's a house sitting in Gillespie County that tells you everything you need to know about a man before he ever says a word. The Henry Basse House.

And to understand it, you have to go back a generation or two. The family line runs to a Reverend Henrich S. W.

Basse, a Lutheran pastor sent by the Adelsverein to serve German settlers in this part of Texas. That's the roots. A man of the cloth, sent out to tend to a community finding its footing in new country.

Fast forward, and that legacy lands in the hands of Henry and his brother Hugo. Now Henry and Hugo Basse, they didn't go into the ministry. They went into business.

The two of them operated the Basse Brothers Cement Yard, and out of that yard came something the region took notice of: the Basse block. A building material. Their building material.

And it caught on. People around here were putting up structures with Basse block, and the name meant something. So when Henry Basse decided to build himself a house, sometime between 1918 and 1920, you can bet he wasn't reaching for somebody else's material.

He used his own. The house stands today as a testament to his business success, and that's not my word for it, that's exactly what the marker says. But here's the thing that makes it more than just a businessman's showpiece.

The design draws from the Prairie School tradition, that clean, horizontal sensibility that was turning heads in American architecture at the time. The plan runs on a center passage, the kind of layout that lets a house breathe. And out front, there's a three-bay, two-story porch with classical box columns rising up from the first story.

The whole thing has a presence. A man descended from a pastor sent to build up a community, built his own block, built up a business, and then built a house that said: this is what it looks like when you see something through. That house in Gillespie County is still saying it.

What the marker says

Descended from the Rev. Henrich S. W. Basse, a Lutheran pastor sent by the Adelsverein to serve German settlers in this area, Henry and Hugo Basse operated the Basse Brothers Cement Yard and created the Basse block, a popular building material in this region. This house, built in 1918-1920 by Henry Basse, is a testament to his business success and is a fine example of Basse block construction. A good local example of Prairie School-influenced design, it features a center passage plan and a three-bay, two-story porch with classical box columns on the first story. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1991