DUANE
Duane's take
Here's what the official marker has to say, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Now, some houses get built out of necessity. Some get built out of ambition.
And some — well, some get built out of love, plain and simple. The James and Selina Phillips house falls into that last category, and don't let anybody tell you different. James Price Phillips came from good Brazoria County stock — his family traced back to one of Stephen F.
Austin's old 300, the original settlers of this county. That's a lineage folks around here still talk about with a certain reverence. In 1911, James Price Phillips married Selina Harris Lee, and together they started building a life and a family, eventually welcoming four children into the world.
Now, when their youngest, Oliver Wendel, was born in 1920, Price didn't hand out cigars and call it a day. No, he built his wife a house. A whole house.
To commemorate that birth. You have to appreciate a man with that kind of follow-through. What he built was no ordinary farmhouse either.
The Phillips house is an American foursquare design, dressed up with prairie and craftsman style detailing — two stories, square floor plan, frame construction, and something that really catches the eye: blond Gonzales brick worked into the porch columns and the chimney. There's a care in those details that tells you something about the people inside. And the land itself carries its own weight of history.
That site had once been a pecan orchard sitting right next to the Dr. Rees Porter home — a place that served as a hospital for soldiers of the Texas Revolution. So Price Phillips built his family's future on ground that had already seen more than its share of Texas story.
The home remained in the Phillips family until 1978. Nearly six decades of one family in one house — birthdays and harvests, good years and hard ones, all held inside those craftsman-trimmed walls. Some houses, they just know how to hold onto people.
What the marker says
James Price Phillips, descendant of a Brazoria County old 300 family, married Selina Harris Lee in 1911. They had four children, and Price built this house for his wife to commemorate the birth of their youngest child, Oliver Wendel, in 1920. The site had been a pecan orchard next to the Dr. Rees Porter home, which served as a hospital for soldiers of the Texas Revolution. The Phillips house is an American foursquare design with prairie and craftsman style detailing. The two-story frame construction house has a square floor plan and blond gonzales brick in the porch columns and chimney. The home remained in the Phillips family until 1978.