DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Now, there's a house sitting in Galveston County with a story layered like its own two stories of galleried wood and memory, so settle in. The house went up in 1899, built by a man named James Nathaniel Davis — went by Nat — and it was designed by a Galveston architect named Charles W.
Bulger. Two stories, galleries running along the front, the kind of place that says a man had plans. And Nat Davis was a man who paid attention to the world around him.
He worked as a reporter for the Galveston Daily News, and in the late summer of 1900, that job put him square in the path of history. Because when that hurricane tore through Galveston, Nat Davis was one of the first people to sit down and write about what it did. Some of the earliest accounts of that destructive storm came from his hand.
He saw it, and he recorded it, and those words went out into the world. Then, two years after the storm, Nat Davis drowned. He was gone, and the house — that two-story galleried residence he'd had built just three years before — passed into the keeping of his wife, Ella, Ella Rust Davis.
And Ella did what resourceful people do. She rented out rooms. One of the tenants who came to stay under that roof was a man named Frank Chauncy Patten, born in 1855.
And Frank Patten carried a distinction of his own — he was the first librarian of Galveston's Rosenberg Library. So this house, built by a man who chronicled a catastrophe and then was taken by the water himself, became a place where one of the city's first great keepers of knowledge hung his hat. Galveston is like that.
The stories stack up, floor by floor.
What the marker says
James Nathaniel "Nat" Davis (d. 1902) built this two-story galleried residence in 1899. The designer was Charles W. Bulger, a Galveston architect. As a reporter for the Galveston Daily News, Davis wrote some of the earliest accounts of the destructive 1900 hurricane. After he drowned two years later, his wife Ella (Rust) rented several rooms of the house. One tenant, Frank Chauncy Patten (1855-1934), was the first librarian of Galveston's Rosenberg Library. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1979