DUANE
Duane's take
Here's my telling of what the official marker says about the Spence-Chamberlain House in Houston County. Now, some houses just stand there. And then some houses have the kind of quiet patience that outlasts everybody who ever called them home.
This one falls into that second category. Around 1870, a man named John Spence set to buildin' himself a house. John was a teacher and a lawyer — two professions that'll test a man's endurance in their own particular ways — and his wife Adele was a teacher herself.
Together they raised up this house with what the marker calls a foursquare configuration: symmetrical windows, a center dormer sittin' up top, and a pyramidal roof pulling the whole thing together like a hat worn just right. It is, by all accounts, a house that knows what it is. But John Spence wouldn't live to see it age.
He died in 1879, leaving Adele behind in that foursquare house with its tidy symmetry and its memories. She kept it for over a decade after that. Then in 1891, Adele sold the place to a druggist by the name of B.
Frank Chamberlain and his wife Una. The Chamberlains settled in, and sometime before 1920 they put their own mark on the house — attaching a kitchen and adding bay windows, the kind of quiet renovations that say we're stayin' a while. And stay they did.
The house remained in the Chamberlain family all the way until 1978. That's the better part of a century under one family's name. A teacher and a lawyer built it.
A druggist and his wife grew into it. And that pyramidal roof just kept watch over all of them, patient as Texas limestone, while the decades rolled on by.
What the marker says
This house was built by teacher and lawyer John Spence and his wife Adele, also a teacher, about 1870. John died in 1879, and in 1891 Adele sold the house to druggist B. Frank Chamberlain and his wife Una. Sometime prior to 1920 the Chamberlains attached a kitchen to the house and added bay windows. The house exhibits a foursquare configuration with symmetrical windows and center dormer on a pyramidal roof. It remained in the Chamberlain family until 1978. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1994