Sebastopol

Duane's take

Here's my telling of what the official marker has to say about a place called Sebastopol, out in Guadalupe County. Now, most folks driving through Seguin might glance at this Greek Revival house and think, fine old place, nice columns, somebody's grandma probably lived there. And they would be missing the whole story.

Because this house is not just old. It is, in a quiet and stubborn way, something close to remarkable. It was built between 1854 and 1856 by a man named Joshua W.

Young. And here is where the story gets interesting, so stay with me. Young did not build this house out of timber, or brick, or stone cut from a quarry.

He built it out of something called limecrete. Cast in place, right there on site, unreinforced, load-bearing walls of lime, sand, and gravel. An early form of concrete.

In the 1850s. In Texas. Now, Seguin was apparently a place that had caught on to something, because this was not the only concrete structure going up in town.

There were many of them. But Sebastopol is one of the important surviving examples of that early concrete technology in the entire southwest. The walls have been standing since before the Civil War, holding up a Greek Revival roofline through everything this part of Texas has thrown at them.

Then, in 1874, a man named Joseph Zorn, Jr. bought the house. Zorn would go on to serve as mayor of Seguin from 1890 to 1910, twenty years running the town while living inside walls that Joshua Young had poured by hand decades before. The house stayed in the Zorn family all the way until 1961.

Think about that span of time. One family, one house made of homemade concrete, holding together longer than most things in this world manage to. The marker calls it an important surviving example.

I'd call it proof that if you mix your lime right and build your walls thick enough, time itself has a hard time arguing with you.

What the marker says

This Greek Revival house was built in 1854-56 by Joshua W. Young with unreinforced, load-bearing walls of cast-in-place limecrete, an early form of concrete made of lime, sand, and gravel. Joseph Zorn, Jr., mayor of Seguin from 1890 to 1910, bought the house in 1874 and it remained in his family until 1961. One of many concrete structures built in Seguin, this is an important surviving example of early concrete technology in the southwest. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark, 1964