Rastus-Read House
1509 First St., South, Lufkin, TXA very fine example of rock cottage and stone masonry in the Craftsman tradition. Built for E.E. Rastus and Erma Read. First listed on Old Diboll Highway in the 1937 city directory. The 1946-1947 and 1957 directories also list E.E. Rastus and Erma Reed as occupants. Read owned the E.E. Rastus Read Tin Shop at 110 S. Bonne, now Waller Sheet Metal. Erma was a saleslady at H. Abram & Son. The house was constructed with East Texas petrified rock. Mary Jewell Tatum, the Read's daughter, recalls that every Sunday the Reads would drive area roads looking for farmers who had cleared their fields of petrified rock. Mr. Read would then send a truck to the farm the next day. The fireplace contains an entire petrified tree. Area is not shown on the 1927 Sanborn map. The contractor was related to W.P. Berry, who built a large number of homes in the Mantooth area of Lufkin. The area of significance is architecture at the local level.
Local significance of the building:Listed in National Register of Historic Places in 1988.
The National Register of Historic Places is the official list of the Nation’s historic places worthy of preservation. Authorized by the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, the National Park Service’s National Register of Historic Places is part of a national program to coordinate and support public and private efforts to identify, evaluate, and protect America’s historic and archeological resources.