DUANE
Duane's take
Here's the story as the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Robert S. Stanley was born right here in Travis County in 1863 — born into a world that was still sorting out what freedom meant — and he lived long enough to see 1941.
What he left behind, though, is the kind of thing that outlasts a man by a good long while. Stanley was an African-American stonemason and laborer, and if you want to know what a man truly believed in, look at what he built with his own hands. In 1895, he built a house.
Built it for his wife Francis and their children. Not a thrown-together shelter, mind you — a home. The front-gabled vernacular house has load-bearing and veneer limestone construction, rusticated by Stanley's own craft.
The walls run two feet thick down in the half-basement. Two feet. The floors and framing are longleaf pine, the kind of material you chose when you intended something to stand.
And stand it did. That house stayed in the Stanley family for more than a century. More than a hundred years of one family's story, held inside walls one man cut and set and fitted into place.
Stanley wasn't finished, either. In 1927, he built a stone building over on West Mary Street. His second wife, Jennie, ran it as a general store.
The man had a habit of building things that mattered. Robert S. Stanley is buried at Evergreen Cemetery in Austin — Travis County soil, same as the limestone he shaped.
Same county that made him. He made sure it would remember him back.
What the marker says
Travis County native Robert S. Stanley (1863-1941), an African-American stonemason and laborer, built this home for his wife Francis and their children in 1895. He later built a stone building on West Mary Street (1927) which his second wife Jennie operated as a general store. The front-gabled vernacular house exhibits Stanley's craftmanship in its rusticate load-bearing and veneer limestone constructino, two-foot thick stone half-basement, and longleaf pine framing and floors. The house remained in the Stanley family for more than a century. Stanley is buried at Austin's Evergreen Cemetery.Recorded Texas Historic Landmark-2001