National Register Listing

Limerick-Frazier House

810 E. 13th St., Austin, TX

The 1876 Limerick-Frazier House at 810 East 13th Street in Austin, Texas, is a modified I-plan house with a century-long connection to African American history. The house was built by immigrant stonemason Joseph Limerick, although he and his wife Elizabeth never occupied the house. By the time Professor John W. Frazier purchased the house in 1905, this section of east Austin was beginning to evolve into a largely African-American community, and the history of the house reflects this demographic change in Austin. By the 1930s, Mrs. Laura Allman Frazier operated the house as lodging for African-American students and travelers who were excluded from white-owned hotels in Austin during the Jim Crow era. Significant for its association with social and cultural life in the early years of the Samuel Huston College (now Huston-Tillotson College), and a as nondiscriminatory tourist home through the mid-20" century, the building is nominated to the National Register under Criterion A, in the Area of Ethnic Heritage/Black, at the local level of significance. The building is also nominated under Criterion C, in the Area of Architecture, at the local level of significance as a good local example of a late 19th century I-plan house, with the addition of a complimentary full porch in the early 20th century.

Local significance of the building:
Listed in National Register of Historic Places in 2005.