Old Town Residential Historic District

Palestine's agricultural, manufacturing, railroad and petroleum based economy created a community of neighborhoods and historic resources significant for their associations with local history and local, state and national architectural trends. The Old Town Residential Historic District is a small concentration of late-19th-to mid-20th century domestic resources reflecting the unusual social structure and development patterns of the east central portion of the city during a period of sustained economic growth and community development fostered by agriculture, manufacturing, the railroad and businesses associated with the exploration and extraction of petroleum products. The district documents land division patterns of the 19th and early 20th centuries and the variety of housing available to Palestine's successful white residents as well as its working class white and African American residents between ca. 1890 and 1955. Related to the historic context Community and Regional Development in Palestine, Anderson County, Texas 1846-1945, the district is comprised primarily of domestic and domestic auxiliary resources, which are defined in more detail in section 7 of this nomination and in the Historic and Architectural Resources of Palestine, Texas Multiple Property National Register nomination and in the expanded property types section of the Palestine Historic Preservation Plan (2001). The Old Town Residential Historic District is maintained in good to fair condition and retains a high degree of integrity. It derives its primary significance from its architectural form, its associations with Palestine's late 19th through mid-20th century development and for its unusual position as a neighborhood that included African Americans and whites in varying proportions as early as the 1890s. For these reasons, the Old Town Residential Historic District is eligible for listing in the National Register of Historic Places at the local level under Criteria A and C in the areas of significance of Community Planning and Development, Architecture and Social History within a period of significance extending from ca. 1890 to 1955. Although the period covered by the 1994 historic context could not be extended beyond 1945 for financial reasons, Palestine's social and economic patterns continued largely unchanged into the late 1950s when local development patterns began to favor mass produced tract type development over eclecticism. Because no racially restrictive covenants were placed on the original town plat or on the 1897 Reagan Addition, the area was home to both white and African American residents and no man-made or natural physical barriers separated the races. Both races lived back to back, across the street from each other and next door to each other on some streets in the district, making the Old Town Residential Historic District unusual within Palestine's largely segregated development patterns. A brief expanded discussion of contextual history appears in this nomination. Thus, the period of significance for this district is extended to the current 50 year mark, which is 1955.