Witte-Schmid House

Duane's take

Here's my telling of what the official marker has to say about the Witte-Schmid House in Austin County. Now, picture a man who spent his career studying law in Hanover, Germany, then crossed an ocean and, at the age of sixty-three, decided what he really needed was over fourteen hundred acres of Texas farmland. That man was Dr.

Ernst Witte, and in 1856 he purchased one thousand four hundred and twenty-two acres and got to work. Cotton went in. And around 1860, up went a farmhouse.

Not just any farmhouse, mind you. A farmhouse that carried the memory of a place called Kleefeld, near Hanover, right down to the roofline. Witte died in 1869, leaving the property to his widow, Lisette.

The land passed through her care, and then in 1884, her heirs sold the house to a young couple: Emilie, who was Ernst and Lisette's own grandchild, and her husband John Schmid, a Swiss settler. The Schmid family held onto that house from that day forward, all the way to 1986. Over a century of one family's life inside those walls.

And what walls they are. The house was constructed with stuccoed sandstone, and if you step inside, you find interior walls of fachwerk and locally-sourced adobe. The floor plan follows a center-passage design, with an asymmetrical placement of the hall, two summer beams overhead, and flat ornamental balusters.

Those details, the marker tells us, are common characteristics of homes built by successful German settlers in this part of Texas in the mid-nineteenth century. But it's the exterior that stops you. Two features in particular stand out, and both of them carry the echo of the old country.

The clipped gables, what the Germans call schiefergedecktes dach, and the eyebrow windows, or dachgaube. Those eyebrow windows had a rough patch: removed in the 1960s, and not restored until 2004. Both features were apparently inspired by Witte's own home back in Kleefeld.

A man builds a house in Texas, and he can't help reaching back across the Atlantic for the shapes that feel like home. The changes over the years have been few. The Schmid family added a porch around 1910.

The roof was replaced in the 1960s and again in 2004. Otherwise, the house stands pretty much as it always has, looking out over the rolling landscape of Austin County. And that, more than anything, is the point.

A German lawyer turned Texas cotton farmer builds a house with sandstone and adobe and old-world rooflines, his granddaughter marries a Swiss settler and raises a family inside it for the better part of a century, and the whole thing is still standing. The Witte-Schmid House is a reminder that German immigration in the mid-nineteenth century didn't just bring people to Texas. It brought an architecture that shaped the way this land looks to this very day.

What the marker says

Dr. Ernst Witte, educated as a lawyer in Hanover, Germany, prior to immigrating to Texas, purchased 1,422 acres of land in 1856, at the age of 63, and quickly improved the property value, producing cotton and adding this farmhouse around 1860. Witte died in 1869, leaving the property to his widow, Lisette. In 1884, her heirs sold the house to Emilie, grandchild to Ernst and Lisette, and John Schmid, a Swiss settler, where it remained in the Schmid family until 1986. An excellent example of rural vernacular architecture, the house was constructed with stuccoed sandstone, with interior walls of fachwerk and locally-sourced adobe. It includes a center-passage plan, asymmetrical placement of the hall with two summer beams and flat ornamental balusters, common characteristics of homes built by successful German settlers in the area in the mid-19th century. On the exterior, two of the most conspicuous Germanic details are the clipped gables, or schiefergedecktes dach, and the eyebrow windows (removed in the 1960s and restored in 2004), or dachgaube. These features were apparently inspired by Witte’s Home in Kleefeld, near Hanover. Relatively unchanged, the porch was added around 1910 by the Schmid family and the roof replaced in the 1960s and 2004. Overlooking the rolling landscape of Austin County, the Witte-Schmid house stands as a reminder of German immigration in the mid-19th century and its impact on the architectural history of Texas. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 2017