DUANE
Duane's take
Here's my telling of what the official marker has to say about the Marshall R. Sanguinet House in Tarrant County. Now, most folks drive past old houses without giving them a second thought — but every now and then, a house has got a story worth slowing down for.
Marshall R. Sanguinet was born in 1859, and by the time Fort Worth was reaching skyward, his name was the one people knew. A noted architect, he planted his roots right here, and that matters, because what you're looking at isn't just a house — it's a house built on the bones of an earlier one.
See, Sanguinet had a residence on this very site before, and that residence was damaged by fire. Now, a lesser man might've walked away from a scorched plot of ground. But Sanguinet?
He incorporated what remained into something new — a Shingle Style house, built about 1894, rising from the ashes of what came before. He was a partner in Sanguinet and Staats, a prominent architecture firm that operated across the whole state of Texas. And his fingerprints were on many of Fort Worth's early multi-story buildings — the kind that changed a cow-town skyline into something that made people stop and look up.
He was also tied to the development of the Arlington Heights subdivision, which, worth noting, included his own home — this home. Marshall R. Sanguinet lived until 1936, long enough to see the city he helped shape grow tall around him.
And somewhere in the walls of this Shingle Style house, there's still a little of that first structure, the one the fire couldn't quite finish. That's the kind of detail that has a way of lingering.
What the marker says
Noted Fort Worth architect Marshall R. Sanguinet (1859-1936) built this Shingle Style house about 1894, incorporating his earlier residence at this site which was damaged by fire. A partner in the prominent statewide architecture firm of Sanguinet and Staats, Marshall Sanguinet was associated with many of the citys early multi-story buildings and with the development of the Arlington Heights subdivision, which included his home.