DUANE
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Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and here's how I'm gonna tell it to you. Somewhere around 1880, in Tyler, Texas, a house went up. Not just any house.
A high Victorian residence, built for an attorney by the name of Harrison Moores Whitaker and his wife, Mattie. Now Mattie was no ordinary East Texas bride. She was the daughter of Micajah H.
Bonner, a Justice on the Texas Supreme Court. So right from the start, this house had some weight to it. Some stature.
And the house itself made sure you knew. Italianate influences. Eastlake style.
An asymmetrical plan that says, plainly, we thought about every single angle of this thing. Outstanding detailing. The kind of home that makes a passerby slow down and stare.
Tyler had a few of these grand Victorian places once upon a time, but most of them are gone now. This one held on. Now, the story doesn't end with the Whitakers.
In 1907, Mattie's sister Annie and her husband, Sidney Smith McClendon, purchased the home. So the house stayed in the family, just shifted one branch over on the family tree. And the McClendon family, they kept it.
They held onto that place all the way until 1979. Decades of living under those carefully detailed rooflines, in those asymmetrical rooms that some architect puzzled over back when Ulysses Grant was still a recent memory. One of the few remaining high Victorian residences in Tyler.
That's not just a fact. That's a responsibility. And for a long time, one family carried it.
What the marker says
Built about 1880 for attorney Harrison Moores Whitaker and his wife, Mattie, daughter of Texas Supreme Court Justice Micajah H. Bonner, this is one of the few remaining high Victorian residences in Tyler. The home was purchased by Mattie's sister, Annie, and her husband, Sidney Smith McClendon, in 1907. It remained in the McClendon family until 1979. With Italianate and Eastlake style influences, the home features an asymmetrical plan and outstanding detailing. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1988