DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'm just passing it along. Now, before Houston was the kind of city where you'd need a whole building just to sell things to people, there was a man named John Kennedy — and that name has a death year of 1878 attached to it, so keep that in mind. As early as 1841, Kennedy was running a trading post in Houston, dealing with frontiersmen and Indians both.
That is early, folks. Houston itself was barely a thought at that point, and here's Kennedy, open for business. By 1860, he had enough going on that he decided to put up a building — not for himself to live in, not for his trading concerns, but as investment property.
The man was thinking ahead. That structure, the oldest part of what we know as the W. L.
Foley Building, is what he left behind. Then — and this is where the story takes a turn — half of it burned. Half gone.
Now enter the son-in-law, a man named W. L. Foley, whose own death year comes in at 1925.
In 1889, Foley rebuilt the lost portion. And here's where a little elegance crept into the whole affair: he didn't just patch it back together and call it done. He hired an architect named Eugene T.
Heiner, and Heiner gave both the old part and the new part a Romanesque revival design — unified, intentional, something worth looking at. But the building's got one more story to tell, and it might be the most lasting one. Inside those walls, W.
L. Foley tutored his nephews. Those nephews went on to found the Foley Brothers' store.
Right there in that building. One man's investment, one fire, one son-in-law with a good architect, and a few lessons taught to the right young men — that's how a structure earns its place in history.
What the marker says
John Kennedy (d. 1878), who had a trading post for frontiersmen and Indians in Houston as early as 1841, built the oldest part of this structure as investment property in 1860. After half of the building burned, his son-in-law, W. L. Foley (d. 1925), rebuilt the lost portion in 1889, giving old and new parts a Romanesque revival design. His architect was Eugene T. Heiner. In this building Foley tutored his nephews who founded the Foley Brothers' store. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1977 Marker Sponsor: Harris County Historical Commission