DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Now picture this — 1859, and a German-born man named Jacob Leser buys himself a piece of Texas land. He doesn't waste a single season.
Right away he's puttin' up a log cabin and a frame structure, and that frame structure isn't for livin' — it's for business. The man is runnin' a soap and candle factory right there on the property. Jacob Leser, born in 1827, came to Texas with work on his mind.
But something changed before 1864. Maybe it was the prospect of marriage, maybe it was just a man decidin' his place needed to be more than a workin' cabin — the marker doesn't say. What it does say is that before 1864, before he married Henrietta Schroeder, Leser added a stone wing to that original cabin.
He was buildin' toward something. He married Henrietta Schroeder — born in 1841 — and the years kept rollin'. Then came the 1880s, and Jacob Leser picked up his ambitions again.
He built a porch. He built brick-and-frame Victorian rooms onto that structure. You can feel the arc of it — log cabin to stone wing to Victorian elegance, decade by decade, the home growin' right along with the life bein' lived inside it.
The original cabin was later removed. But the rest stood. Jacob Leser died in 1901, and Henrietta had passed before him in 1889.
Even so, the home stayed in the family — occupied by Leser heirs all the way until 1951. Nearly a century from that first purchase, the family's presence finally ended. Then in 1952, General and Mrs.
Felipe A. Latorre bought the property. They didn't let it fade.
They restored it. They enlarged it. A house that began as a log cabin beside a soap and candle factory had found, somehow, another chapter.
That's the thing about a well-built place — it outlasts the hands that built it, and sometimes finds exactly the people it needs next.
What the marker says
After purchasing this land in 1859, German-born Jacob Leser (1827-1901) erected a log cabin and a frame structure to house his soap and candle factory. Before 1864, when he married Henrietta Schroeder (1841-89), Leser added this stone wing to the cabin. He built the porch and the brick-and-frame Victorian rooms in the 1880s. Cabin was later removed. Occupied until 1951 by Leser heirs, the home was bought in 1952 by Gen. and Mrs. Felipe A. Latorre, who restored and enlarged it. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1962