Stewart Pioneer Home

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Now, some stories start with a man and end with a building, but the best ones, they start with a man and end with a family. This is one of those.

Benjamin Hansford Stewart was born in Tennessee, and sometime in 1851 he pointed himself toward Texas and made the journey. He took up farming and ranching out in Burnet County, the kind of work that asks everything of a man and gives back exactly what the land feels like giving that year. But Stewart was more than a farmer.

The county called on him to serve as sheriff, and he did, from 1874 to 1875. You hold a badge in Burnet County in the 1870s, you've seen some things. The marker doesn't elaborate, and neither will I, but let's just say that tenure meant something.

Now, Stewart lived a long life. He died in 1932, which means he was around to see plenty of the twentieth century arrive. And somewhere in 1905, he did what a lot of good fathers do.

He built something. He put up a frame house, right there on the property, as a residence for his son Homer and Homer's wife Viola. It's what's called a Texas style home, similar to other ranch houses dotting that part of the Hill Country in the early nineteen hundreds.

But there's one feature worth singling out, something you'd notice if you walked up to it today. That chimney. Hand-hewn limestone, cut and shaped by hand, stacked up to do its job.

Now here's where the story gets its real weight. That house Benjamin Hansford Stewart built for his son in 1905, it didn't pass out of the family. Six generations of the B.

H. Stewart family have owned and used it. Six.

The man came out of Tennessee in 1851, pinned on a sheriff's badge, built a house for his boy, and somehow, across all the years that followed, the family held on. That's not just a house. That's a answer to a question about what lasts.

What the marker says

Benjamin Hansford Stewart (d. 1932), a native of Tennessee, came to Texas in 1851. A farmer and rancher, he also served as Burnet County sheriff, 1874-75. He constructed this frame house in 1905 as a residence for his son Homer and daughter-in-law Viola. The Texas style home, similar to other area ranch houses of the early 1900s, features a chimney of hand-hewn limestone. Six generations of the B. H. Stewart family have owned and used the home. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1980