Landrum House

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. This is the Landrum House, standing in Cameron County, and the ground it sits on has a story that starts long before the first nail was ever driven. We're talking about a land grant, the kind that came straight from the king of Spain himself, issued in 1781 to two men named Eugenio and Bartolome Fernandez.

The Concepcion de Carricitos grant. Royal land, sitting out there in what would one day become deep South Texas. Now, land like that passes through hands, and hands, and hands again.

Years roll by, heirs appear, legal matters tangle up the way they always do, and that's where a man named Colonel Stephen Powers of Brownsville enters the picture. The Colonel took on legal services for the heirs of that old Spanish grant, and when the bill came due, his fee wasn't paid in coin. He acquired a part of the grant itself.

Think about that. A slice of land that had been a Spanish royal grant, now in the hands of a Brownsville attorney as payment for legal work. What he did next is the part that sticks with you.

He gave that site to his daughter Frances and her husband, James Lambert Landrum. A gift from a father to his child, out there on ground touched by a king's signature more than a century before. The Landrums set to work, and in 1902 they completed the house that still stands today.

They raised daughters in that house, three of them: Martha, Pauline, and Frances. And here's where the story does something stories rarely get to do. It catches up to the present.

Because when this marker was recorded in 1978, Frances, daughter of James and Frances Landrum, owns the house. She lives in it. The same house her parents completed, on the same land that came down from a Spanish royal grant of 1781.

Some things, it turns out, hold.

What the marker says

This house stands on the 1781 Concepcion de Carricitos grant from the king of Spain to Eugenio and Bartolome Fernandez. Acquiring a part of the grant as fee for his legal services to the heirs, col. Stephen Powers of Brownsville gave the site to his daughter Frances and her husband, James Lambert Landrum. The landrums, who completed the house in 1902, had daughters: Martha, Pauline and Frances. In 1978 Frances owns and lives in the house.