DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker on the Randolph-Field Place tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. This is one of Calvert's earliest houses, and friend, it has seen some living. Greek revival in style — columns and dignity and all the formality that phrase suggests — it was built about 1871 by a man named George F.
Randolph, a local merchant. Now the marker notes, and I love that it notes this, that Randolph was said to have been a kinsman of United States President Thomas Jefferson. Said to have been.
That little hedge is doing a lot of work, but it's the kind of lineage claim that follows a family the way a good hat follows a man. You don't question it out loud. George brought his bride, Lucy Garrett, to live in this house, and by any measure it must have been a fine beginning.
A fine house, a young merchant with presidential blood in his veins, or close enough. And then 1873 came. Yellow fever.
George Randolph died in that epidemic, and just like that, Lucy was a widow in one of Calvert's earliest homes, carrying the weight of all that promise herself. She kept going. That's the quiet heroism the marker doesn't editorialize about but absolutely implies.
By 1878, Lucy married again — a man named Scott Field, described as a rising statesman. Rising turned out to be the right word. From 1887 to 1891, Scott Field served as a United States Congressman.
The house that George Randolph built, the house where he and Lucy began their life together, had become the Field family home. And it stayed that way. The house remained in the Field family all the way until 1941 — carrying two names, two marriages, two entirely different arcs of a Texas life, all inside those Greek revival walls.
Some houses just hold more history than they let on from the outside.
What the marker says
One of Calvert's earliest houses, Greek revival in style. Built about 1871 by George F. Randolph, local merchant, said to have been a kinsman of U. S. President Thomas Jefferson. Randolph and his bride, Lucy Garrett, lived here until he died in 1873 yellow fever epidemic. The widow married (1878) Scott Field, a rising statesman who in 1887-91 was a United States Congressman. House remained in the Field family until 1941. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1970