Littlefield House

The Littlefield House was built in 1893 by a Texas cattle millionaire, Col. George Washington Littlefield. Its picturesque silhouette, architectural embroidery, and somber color contrast strongly with the heavy tile roofs and buff brick and cream limestone buildings of Mediterranean Renaissance derivation or contemporary limestone and brick structures of the University of Texas campus. However, it fits surprisingly well as counter point and as relief. It serves symbolically as the only real reminder of the past of a university that is older than it now looks and as an architectural heritage of Texas' Gay Nineties. The house is not only a symbol of an era and the early University but it also stands for a type of man nearly forgotten. The generous millionaire, sharp and honest in his business and personal dealings, who holds tremendous confidence in his own rightful importance may still exist. But Littlefield was also a sort of man who no longer lives anywhere. He was relatively unlettered and his correspondence is a fascinating puzzle of unpunctuated sentences and strange spelling. He was a proud "Texian" who had risen from Second Sergeant to Major in Terry's Texas Rangers. An ardent Southerner, born in Mississippi in 1842 but in Texas by the time he was eight.

Littlefield was seriously wounded during the Civil War. He made his fortune initially in early cattle drives to better markets in the North. He used the profits on new investments in more cattle but also on other unrelated businesses. He founded the American National Bank of Austin and invested in real estate. At the time he built this home he was owner of the Driskill Hotel in Austin. He was a patriarch with no children of his own, electing instead to become head-of-the-family to a great number of nieces and nephews, and to their children in turn. Eventually he gave more than two million dollars to the University and was a Regent from 1911 until immediately before his death. Among his gifts were the Wrenn Library and the Littlefield Fund for Southern History, the of the "perip", the sidewalk that encircled the forty acre campus, as well as money for a great fountain honoring his own personal heroes. When he died in 1920, he willed his home to the University.

There was a simple, but serious, purpose in building a house like the Littlefield House. Such houses were overstated and some-times bombastic, composed from hybrid sources, but they meant status in the community and proof of position to their owners. They were meant to impress. They were not the houses of the sophisticated New Englander building in the Shingle Style, although these too could be quite ostentatious. This house is of a character specifically Texan especially in its late use of Second Empire forms.

Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1954.