Trueheart House

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, as best as Duane can do it justice. Now, if you ever find yourself out in Jeff Davis County, standing in the shadow of the Davis Mountains, you might notice a house that doesn't quite look like it belongs to the high desert, and yet somehow looks like it couldn't belong anywhere else. That's the Trueheart House, and it's got a story worth knowing.

Built about 1898, this place is a Queen Anne style home, which is a fancy way of saying it was put together with real architectural intention; a style more at home on a city street than a mountain hollow. And the craftsmen who raised it didn't ship everything in from somewhere else, either. They worked with native stone, adobe, and milled wood, layering old-world form onto West Texas material.

The result is something you don't forget. Now the family behind it, Henry M. and Annie Trueheart, they were Galveston people. Henry was a prominent real estate investor down on the coast, the kind of man who knew property and knew value.

But even a man who deals in real estate knows you can't put a price on a cool summer breeze when the Gulf Coast is doing its worst. So the Truehearts built themselves a retreat up in the Davis Mountains, where the air runs clean and the heat doesn't follow you. The family spent their summers here, escaping the coastal heat, taking in what the marker calls the healthful climate of these mountains.

And for over two decades, that's exactly what they did. The house stayed in the Trueheart family all the way until 1920. More than twenty years of summers.

More than twenty years of that stone and adobe holding the warmth of the day and letting the night stay cool. Then it passed on, the way things do. But the house itself, it's still standing out there in Jeff Davis County, native stone and all, a Queen Anne lady in a West Texas world, and she does not look like she's going anywhere.

What the marker says

An excellent example of a Queen Anne style house executed in native stone, adobe, and milled wood, this house was built about 1898 as a summer home for the family of Henry M. and Annie Trueheart, residents of Galveston, where Mr. Trueheart was a prominent real estate investor. The family spent summers here to escape the coastal heat and enjoy the healthful climate of the Davis Mountains. The house remained in the family until 1920. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1964