Donalson, Cora Jackman, House

The 1913 Cora Jackman Donalson House is the only documented house in Kyle, Texas, made from a catalog plan book of the Radford Architectural Company. Built by Cora Donalson, the daughter of a prominent family, the house represents the growth of the residential area of Kyle during the early 20th century. The Donalson House is nominated for listing in the National Register of Historic Places in the area of Architecture at the local level of significance as it is a characteristic and well-preserved example of Radford-type residential design in Kyle, Texas. The Radford Architectural Company of Chicago was well-known for its unique blending of early 20th-century styles with characteristics of the Victorian and Queen Anne idioms. The property retains a sufficient degree of its historic integrity as all of the alterations to the property were made during the period of significance. The period of significance for the property is 1913 to 1936, the construction date of a contributing garage. The Donalson House was designated as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark by the Texas Historical Commission in 2009.

Historical Development of Kyle, Hays County, Texas

Kyle, Texas, was built as a railroad town to provide a rail stop for the International and Great Northern Railroad line between Austin and San Antonio. In 1879, Captain Fergus Kyle and David Moore donated over 200 acres to the Texas Land Company for the new townsite. Lots were sold to the highest bidder under the "Auction Oak" on what would become South Sledge Street in 1880. Parcels of land were set aside for public buildings, a park, and schools. The original 18-block townsite stretched from Nance Street on the west to Front Street on the east. North and South streets served as the boundaries in those respective directions.

The town's early growth centered upon an agricultural economy of cattle and cotton, maize, and sorghum crops; the blackland prairie soils to the east of Kyle supported farms and dairies. By the late 1880s, a large community of immigrant Germans settled in this area on lands once owned by Colonel R. J. Sledge. To the west of Kyle, ranching predominated with the raising of cattle, mules, and jacks. Kyle quickly became a regional center for the cattle industry with the local rail line sporting eight shipping yards for transporting cattle by rail. Business growth in the town included a cotton gin, oil mill, banks, grocery, and two lumber companies by 1900.
The local Baptist community leaders established the Kyle Baptist Seminary in 1881 on property that included the site of the Auction Oak. Management problems and conflicts plagued the school, and by 1890 two of its three buildings burned. Following the closure of the school, a judge ordered the lands sold and the proceeds given to the Kyle public school. The Duty family purchased the remaining seminary building and sold off portions of that land over the next twenty years.

The City of Kyle was incorporated in 1906 with a population of approximately 200 citizens. By 1910, businesses as diverse as a creamery, bottling works, banks, a pharmacy, and doctors' offices operated alongside general stores, livery stables, blacksmith shops, lumber yards, and the ever-important railroad depot. The first permanent city hall was constructed in 1912 by San Marcos architect Roy Thomas (NRHP 2002). The city witnessed its first automobile in 1905, and the first federally funded road in Texas the Austin to San Antonio Post Road-was constructed in 1915, bringing traffic through the very center of the town of Kyle. By 1916 electricity became available throughout town. During the first decades of the twentieth century, a middle class became established in Kyle as merchants began to thrive.

The small town of Kyle has grown extensively since the Donalson House was first built. Since the completion of U.S. Interstate Highway 35 in 1962, shopping centers have sprouted along the interstate and the town has expanded along that corridor to the north towards Austin. What were formerly farms to the east were converted into modern housing developments starting in the 1970s. The older neighborhoods within the city's center, however, have escaped any adverse effects from this burgeoning growth.

Cora Jackman Donalson (1853-1926)

Cora Jackman Donalson was born in 1853 near Rocheport, Missouri, to Martha and Sidney Drake Jackman (1826-1886). In 1855, Jackman purchased land near the Missouri-Kansas border and joined the Missouri state militia. Jackman rose to the rank of Brigadier General for the Confederacy during the Civil War and settled with his family in central Texas, where he served a term in the Texas legislature. Cora came of age during the Civil War and its aftermath, and she and her family endured many hardships, including living in a tent in central Texas while her father was away. In 1875 Cora married Chauncey Barnett Donalson (1835-1912), and they lived on a 738-acre ranch south of Kyle known as the Live Oak Springs Ranch. The Donalsons were early supporters of education in Kyle, and their children attended the Kyle Baptist Seminary School. Cora taught in the Kyle public school system, as did her daughter Laura Belle, for whom the Laura Belle Wallace Middle School is named today. After the death of her husband in 1912, Cora Donalson moved from the ranch and retired to the town of Kyle, a widow at the age of 59. Cora had the resources to build any kind of house wherever she wanted, and she chose to build near the heart of the town. She purchased one of the former Kyle Baptist Seminary lots from the Duty family in May 1913, and subsequently ordered plans for her house from the Radford Architectural Company through the Wallace Brothers Lumber Company. Cora was 60 years old when oversaw the construction of the house. She left the operation of the ranch to her children and her husband's children his first wife. Cora's daughter Laura Belle Donalson married Charles D. Wallace in 1915, moving into a new Craftsman bungalow he built for them at 106 Sledge Street, directly to the north of her mother's home. Wallace owned the Wallace Brothers Lumber Company with his brother, an enterprise first established by their father, H.C. Wallace, in 1881. The onslaught of World War I and the worldwide influenza pandemic of 1918 took its toll on the town of Kyle. By the early 1920s, much of the economic boom of the prior decades was lost due to a series of floods, droughts, and the devastation caused by the boll weevil. According to many observers, "the Depression [sic] started in Kyle ten years earlier than the rest of the nation, and Kyle entered thirty years of stagnation and difficult times." (Recorded Texas Historic Landmark files, "Cora Donalson House"). Cora Jackman Donalson died in 1926.

Subsequent Owners of the Donalson House (1933-present)

Wallace Alexander "Lex" Word purchased Cora Donalson's house from her estate during the height of the Great Depression in 1933. Word had worked at the Sledge Grocery, owned and operated by his grandfather, before opening his general store and grocery, the Bon Ton, with partners in 1926. The Bon Ton served as a community gathering place for the town and at one time served as the site of Kyle's first library. After the Kyle State Bank town's only bank- closed, Word, along with his neighbor, Charles D. Wallace, helped reorganize it as the Citizens State Bank. Word also opened an implement store and began a cooperative cotton gin for local farmers during the 1930s. (Texas Historical Commission marker files for "Lex Word and the Bon Ton")

In 1929, Word married schoolteacher Louise Gossett, and soon they needed additional space for their growing family. The Word family purchased the house at 200 South Sledge Street in 1933. According to daughter Wynette Barton, who grew up in the house, the Words occupied the ground floor with their four children, and Lex Word's widowed mother occupied the upstairs. They enclosed the south side of the wrap-around porch to use as a bedroom and constructed a small addition on the north side of the house. The former sitting room also was utilized as a bedroom with a new bathroom attached to it. The older wood flooring of the porch was removed and a new concrete floor was laid at ground level; with the higher porch now removed, brick bases were installed to support the columns that were too short to reach the ground. According to Wynette Word Barton, the porch railing also was removed at this time. (Wynette Barton interview. The current owner contends that the porch was infilled before 1926 during Donalson's ownership, based on a 1923 date stamped on the bathtub.) The Word family remained in the house until 1943 when they moved to a ranch on the outskirts of town; Lex Word's mother continued to occupy the house, moving into the downstairs area. After she suffered a stroke in the mid-1940s, a family from Ukraine moved into the house to care for her, living in the upstairs area. Lex Word's mother died in 1950, and the Word family continued to rent the home to other area families until they sold it to Jim and Bonnie Box in 1957. Elbert and Nadine Steele purchased the house in 1962 and the current owners purchased it from the Steele estate in 1997. The Kolacny family has carefully maintained the integrity of the house in their efforts to preserve it, replacing materials as necessary.

The Architecture of the Donalson House

During the early part of the 20th century, small towns like Kyle experienced rapid growth as rail lines transported people and materials across the country. Among the goods transported were the components necessary to build houses. The availability of cut lumber allowed for the quick construction needed in rapidly growing new towns. One could order an entire house ready for assembly, or any parts necessary to construct or finish a home. These houses represented the popular styles of the day, and buyers were encouraged to make personalized changes to window or door placement, or even the reversal of an entire floor plan. This mail-order process of standardized homes spread similar styles across central Texas and changed home construction from a local craftsman-based market to a national industry.

The Donalson House was constructed in 1913 from plans acquired from the Radford Architectural Company (Figure 1, p. 18). William A. Radford got his start in the lumber business in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, in the 1880s, and by 1890 he had established the Radford Sash and Door Company, selling construction materials through mail-order catalogs. His first set of building plans, Radford Ideal Homes, was published in 1898. In 1902, he established the Radford Architectural Company in Chicago, Illinois; by 1911, Radford boasted that his company was the "largest architectural establishment in the world," hiring architects and draftsmen to design hundreds of house plans as well as plans for apartment buildings, commercial buildings, barns, and garages. Radford would issue over 40 catalogs of house plans in addition to encyclopedias of construction, technical books, and three monthly trade journals. The company folded when Radford retired in 1926.

The consumer who purchased a set of Radford's house plans received a full set of blueprints, typically consisting of sixteen to twenty drawings including the foundation plan, floor plans, roof plan, exterior and interior elevations, and full-scale details. The plans could be printed in reverse. Customers also received an additional sixteen to twenty pages of construction specifications. The cost of the plans varied from five dollars for a small house to twelve dollars for larger, more complicated designs. Although the company provided estimated costs for the construction of the houses, a proviso added that the final cost depended upon regional availability and prices of lumber and labor.

The floor plan of the Donalson House is the mirror image of the Radford Architectural Company's design number 1517 (also known as design number 517 in some publications). This design first appeared in the 1908 Radford's Artistic Homes, as well as in the 1909 edition of Radford's Portfolio of Plans. According to Daniel Reiff, in Houses from Books: Treatises, Pattern Books, and Catalogs in American Architecture, 1738-1950, "Radford Design No. 517, published in American Homes of 1903, is a... Queen Anne's design in which the picturesque massing and projecting bays are compactly arranged and the detailing simplified and made more classical under the impact of Academic and Colonial revivals. The semi-circular attic windows and especially the Ionic veranda with pediment marking the entrance are the most prominent of the classical features."

Cora Donalson acquired the plans and the lumber for her house through the Wallace Brothers Lumber Company in Kyle; the lumber of the attic walls still bears the handwritten delivery destination to "Wallace Brothers, Kyle." Before its construction in 1913, changes were made to the house plan, including the elimination of the rear staircase and the addition of an upstairs sleeping porch. A second chimney and open fireplace were added to the parlor and the fireplace in the sitting room was eliminated. The exterior was constructed as designed, except for the reversal of the plan and the elimination of the brackets under the eaves.

The Wallace Brothers Lumber Company built other buildings in Kyle, several of which are known through their advertisements in the Kyle High School Yearbook, The Bluebonnet. While some of these buildings were constructed outside of the city's limits, such as the Bunton House, several of the houses were constructed within a one-block radius of the Donalson House. The C.D. Wallace House was constructed next door to the Donalson House by the owner of the Wallace Brothers Lumber Company, and the Neuhaus House was built at the southeast corner of Sledge and Center Streets. (The Bluebonnet, 1919) A search through the Radford catalogs has revealed that these houses were not constructed from Radford plans.

The Cora Jackman Donalson house is significant as a good realization of a Radford plan, and it is the only documented example of a pattern book house in Kyle. The house is included in the "Historic Resources Survey of the City of Kyle, Texas and Its Extra-Territorial Jurisdiction" prepared by Hardy Heck Moore and Associates, Inc., in 1994. The property is listed in this inventory as a high-priority property and significant for its architecture, despite the modification of the porch by the early 1930s, within the period of significance. It was designated a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 2009. The Donalson House is therefore nominated to the National Register of Historic Places at the local level of significance under Criterion C, in the area of Architecture. The period of significance ends in 1936, the confirmed date of the second building on the property, a brick garage.