M.B. Lockett Building

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Now, the ground this building stands on has been doing business for a long, long time. We're talking the 1840s, when a store first set up shop on this very site.

Whatever that early operation looked like, it didn't survive the Civil War intact. But after the war, somebody came along and put up a new structure right on that same footprint. The bones were there.

The commerce kept coming. By the 1880s, the place was humming along as the home of Rucker and Montgomery, a mercantile firm that knew how to keep the shelves stocked and the customers happy. Then, in 1889, a fellow arrived who would put his name on this corner for good.

Melville Beveridge Lockett, an Ohio native who had clearly decided Texas suited him just fine, opened his store right here. And if that were the whole story, well, it'd be a decent one. But Lockett wasn't finished.

In 1896, he remodeled the building into something that made people stop and look up. Victorian design, done proper. Cast iron columns holding things up with a quiet authority.

An elaborate pressed metal parapet crowning the roofline like it knew it was being admired. And then, the showstopper, a corner turret with a domed oriel bay that announces itself to every intersection it faces. That's not a building that's shy about being a building.

The M.B. Lockett Building. Still standing.

Still turning heads.

What the marker says

Located on the site of an 1840s store, this structure was built after the Civil War. In the 1880s it housed the mercantile firm of Rucker & Montgomery. Ohio native Melville Beveridge Lockett opened his store here in 1889 and remodeled the building to its present Victorian design in 1896. Prominent architectural features include cast iron columns, an elaborate pressed metal parapet, and a corner turret with a domed oriel bay. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1991