Lowell Smith Home

Duane's take

Here's how the marker tells it, and I'll give it to you straight. Somewhere in Johnson County stands a house that's got more than one lifetime built into it, and I mean that just about literally. The story starts with an 1850 house.

Now that structure, old as it was, didn't just get torn down and forgotten. Its pine and poplar lumber, its very bones, were acquired by a man named John Wesley Smith: Civil War veteran, banker, a man who came to Johnson County in 1868. And John Wesley Smith, he held onto that material.

He let it sit with him a while. Then, in 1887, he built this home. Not from fresh-cut timber ordered out of some catalogue.

From the salvaged pine and poplar of that 1850 house, along with other materials, he raised something new. You think about that: lumber that was already decades old when he laid it into place. And to hold it all together, square iron nails.

Not the round wire nails that were coming into fashion. Square iron nails. The kind that bite in and don't let go.

A Civil War veteran who knew something about things that need to hold. That's the Lowell Smith Home, Johnson County, Texas, built in 1887, out of an 1850 house, by a man who clearly believed nothing worth keeping ought to go to waste.

What the marker says

Of pine and poplar lumber and other materials from an 1850 house acquired by John Wesley Smith, Civil War veteran and banker who came to Johnson County in 1868. Built this home 1887. Used square iron nails. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1965