The Curtis Mansion

Duane's take

Here's how the marker tells it, and here's how I'm gonna tell it to you. Somewhere around the turn of the century, cotton was king in Bell County, and W.R. and Ida Miller, she being born a Rogers, were doing very well by that king. Good cotton years have a way of filling a man's pockets and a woman's imagination, and in 1902, those two turned their prosperity into something you could walk through and touch.

They built themselves a late Victorian house, and they did not do it halfway. Queen Anne features mingled with what was then called the Shingle style, a look that was popular back east at the time, and somehow those two things came together in Bell County and made something worth remembering. Now, fireplaces.

Every room. Not the parlor, not the sitting room, every single room in the house had a fireplace. Fine materials, fine detailing, inside and out.

Elegance is the word the marker uses, and when a building earns that word, you don't argue with it. The Millers built something that could hold its head up. Then the years moved on, as years do, and the house passed to other hands.

The A. Lon Curtis Family came into the picture in 1914, and they stayed with this house all the way through 1973. Decades of care.

Decades of enhancing and preserving what the Millers had built. The house even carries their name now, the Curtis Mansion. A cotton fortune raised it, and good stewardship kept it standing.

That is not a small thing.

What the marker says

W.R. and Ida (Rogers) Miller, rich from good cotton years at turn of the century, built this late Victorian house in 1902. In its architecture, Queen Anne features are mingled with Shingle style then popular in the eastern U.S. The design included fireplaces in every room. Fine materials and detailing inside and out gave elegance to the structure. The later owners, particularly the A. Lon Curtis Family (1914-73), have enhanced and preserved the house. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1977