Joseph Brooks Home

Duane's take

Here's the story as the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. A man named Joseph Brooks was born in England in 1831, and somewhere along the way he decided that England simply wasn't enough world for him. In 1853, he and his wife Mary Ann, she was a Farrer before she was a Brooks, made the crossing to Texas together.

That right there takes a certain kind of nerve. A new country, a new life, all of it ahead of them. Then the Civil War came, as it came for so many, and Joseph Brooks served.

He came through it. And then, as if the war hadn't been enough of a test, he settled in Navasota and ran straight into 1867. That was yellow fever year.

An epidemic that did not spare Navasota, and did not spare many who called it home. Joseph Brooks, somehow, survived it. You get the sense this was not a man easily stopped.

He went on to become a leading lumberman in the area, and in the 1870s he had this home built for his family. Victorian in its original design, it was a house meant to say something. Mary Ann lived on in it until 1900, eleven years after Joseph passed in 1889.

But the story of this house doesn't end there. The Brooks' daughter, Mary Elizabeth Brooks Salyer, took the place in hand between 1909 and 1911, and she had it modified with classical revival detailing. She put her own mark on what her father built.

That's the thing about a house with good bones. Every generation gets a chance to leave something behind.

What the marker says

A native of England, Joseph Brooks (1831-89) migrated to Texas with his wife Mary Ann (Farrer) (1833-1900) in 1853. After serving in the Civil War, Brooks moved to Navasota, where he survived an 1867 yellow fever epidemic and became a leading area lumberman. In the 1870s he had this home built for his family. Originally Victorian in design, it was modified with classical revival detailing in 1909-11 by the Brooks' daughter Mary Elizabeth Brooks Salyer. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1981