National Register Listing

Hinchee House

1814 Park St., Beaumont, TX

<p>The Hinchee House at 1814 Park Street in Beaumont was built in 1901 by Martin Luther Hinchee and his bride. The Hinchees commissioned a local architect, H. C. Mauer, to build their home soon after their wedding. Mauer was a native Texan who received his training at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. He moved to Beaumont during the Spindletop oil boom at the turn of the century. The elaborate house he designed for the Hinchees is an excellent example of the new opulence in Beaumont homes during the first Spindletop boom days. The Queen Anne-style house is reflective of the movement toward more classical elements that occurred in the late 19th and early 20th centuries with its classical portico and classical columns used on galleries, fireplace mantels, and a screen of Ionic columns inside the house.</p><p>Martin Luther Hinchee moved to Beaumont from the East. He met Caroline Gilbert, a member of the choir, at the Methodist Episcopalian Church South in Beaumont where he was organist. She was the heiress of an oil fortune and had studied art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, and at various Chautauqua assemblies in the East. Most of her paintings were copies of famous works. Mr. Hinchee was in the lumber business, and the grain business, and was a director in the Gilbert Co., operators in the Sour Lake Oil Field. Mr. and Mrs. Hinchee lived in their home on Park St. until Mrs. Hinchee's untimely death in 1912. The house was vacated soon after, and Mr. Hinchee moved to California. The furnishings from the house were destroyed in a warehouse fire sometime after&nbsp;920.</p><p>The house is now being purchased by Bryan Hendrix for use as his residence and personal office.</p>

Local significance of the building:
Listed in National Register of Historic Places in 1978.