White - Turner House

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'm just along for the ride. Now, Bastrop has seen its share of fine homes come and go, but this one on the marker, the White-Turner House, has a story that moves through families the way a good horse moves through a field. Steady, purposeful, and with a little style to spare.

John W. and Martha L. White had this late nineteenth-century Victorian home constructed in 1890, and they lived here until 1894. Four years under one roof, and then the house passed on, the way houses do, through several families over the following years.

Then, in 1901, a man named Nash Turner stepped in and purchased it. Not for himself, mind you. For his mother, Kate.

Now that right there tells you something about the man before you even hear the rest. Nash Turner was an internationally recognized race horse trainer. Internationally recognized.

We're talking about a man whose reputation reached well beyond the red dirt roads of Bastrop County, and yet in 1920 and 1921, he came back and lived right here in this house, with his mother Kate, in the home he had bought for her. The house itself is something to look at, featuring fine Eastlake gingerbread trim, that ornate woodwork style that Victorian builders loved to show off along the edges of porches and rooflines. It's the kind of detail that makes a house look like it was dressed up for company.

The Turner family held onto this place all the way until 1937. An internationally traveled man, a devoted son, a house full of history, and every bit of it right here in Bastrop.

What the marker says

John W. and Martha L. White had this late 19th-century Victorian home constructed in 1890 and lived here until 1894. Several families owned the house until 1901 when Nash Turner purchased it for his mother, Kate. Turner, an internationally recognized race horse trainer, lived here with his mother in 1920-21. The home, which features fine Eastlake gingerbread trim, remained in the Turner family until 1937. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1983