Nolte-Rooney House

Duane's take

Here's how the marker tells it, and I'll pass it right along to you. Way out in what used to be called Murphyville, the part of Alpine that stretches to the northwest, there stands a house that has been standing right there since 1890. And I do mean standing.

F.H. Nolte, an early settler out in that hard Brewster County country, built the place that year, and he did not build it light. Those walls are twenty inches thick; twenty inches; made of adobe bricks that were molded right there at the building site.

Nobody trucked anything in from somewhere fancy. Nolte's people mixed and pressed and shaped those bricks on the very ground the house was going up on, then stacked them into walls that could keep the West Texas heat at arm's length and the West Texas wind at something closer to a conversation than a fight. Three years that house belonged to F.H.

Nolte. Then, in 1893, it sold to a man named John Rooney, and not just any man. John Rooney was the second county Sheriff of Brewster County.

So those adobe walls, already thick enough to make a point, passed from the hands of one early settler into the hands of the law itself. Now here's the part that stops you if you're payin' attention: the exterior of that house looks today exactly as it did in 1890. The walls didn't soften.

The shape didn't shift. Whatever F.H. Nolte set down on that Murphyville ground, it held.

Some things in West Texas just decide they're not leavin', and the Nolte-Rooney House made that decision a long, long time ago.

What the marker says

Built 1890 by F.H. Nolte, early settler, on land in Murphyville (NW Alpine). The 20 inch walls are made of adobe bricks molded at the building site. Home was sold 1893 to John Rooney, second county Sheriff. The exterior looks as it did in 1890. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark --1968