DUANE
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Duane's take
The marker's got the story, and here's how I tell it. Gather round, because this one goes back to the 1870s, when a Georgia stonemason named James Henry White put his hands to work in the Texas Hill Country. White was building a home, and he was building it out of limestone, with those clean lines and careful proportions you'd call Greek Revival styling.
He wasn't building it for himself, though. He was building it for a man named Charles F. Schmidtke.
Born in Germany, Schmidtke had made his way to Bandera and made himself useful, the way a town needs a man to do. Merchant, grist miller, lumber mill operator. He was woven into the fabric of that early community.
Schmidtke lived in that fine limestone house until 1884, when his story came to a close, he'd been born in 1839. Now, the house stood on. Limestone has a way of outlasting the people who commission it.
Fast forward a good stretch of years, and here comes J. Calvin Callahan, who just happens to be the grandson of the very stonemason who built the place. James Henry White's own grandson.
In 1927, Callahan purchased the property. He ran a feed store and a poultry business, and he called that house home. Callahan passed in 1958, but the house stayed in the family, stayed Callahan, all the way into the 1970s.
A Georgia stonemason builds a house for a German immigrant on Texas soil, and decades later his own grandson comes back to live inside the walls his grandfather raised. Some houses, friend, have a way of keeping score.
What the marker says
This home was constructed in the 1870s by Georgia stonemason James Henry White for Charles F. Schmidtke (1839-1884). A native of Germany, Schmidtke was an early Bandera merchant, grist miller, and lumber mill operator. White's grandson J. Calvin Callahan (d. 1958), the owner of a feed store and poultry business, purchased the property in 1927. The limestone house, with influences of Greek Revival styling, remained in the Callahan family until the 1970s. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1981.