Porter, Katherine Anne, House

The Katherine Anne Porter Childhood Home is an excellent example of a late-19th century vernacular L-plan house in the rural agricultural town of Kyle, Hays County, Texas, but it is best known as the childhood home of Katherine Anne Porter, one of the most distinguished writers of 20th century American literature. Built about 1890 on Center Street at the western edge of Kyle, a newly platted railroad town between Austin and San Antonio in Central Texas, the house was originally distinguished primarily by its spacious yard, corner lot, and near-full façade front porch. With the passage of time and the loss of many of the town's earliest homes, the house is now a rare example of the original housing stock of the early era. It has never suffered major alteration and has recently been repaired and restored. In excellent condition, the house is nominated to the National Register of Historic Places for Architecture. The house is also nominated for its association with author Katherine Anne Porter, a Guggenheim fellow and the only author to win both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award which she received for her Collected Short Stories in 1966. Although Ms. Porter is well-remembered for her only novel, Ship of Fools, her true genius is found in her short fiction for which she has received her broadest acclaim. Home to the writer during her formative years, the Katherine Anne Porter House appears frequently in her work, either as a composite or as it was in her memory. The town of Kyle and her girlhood home provided a backdrop for her literature.

The years spent in Kyle were unhappy ones for the young girl - her mother's death precipitated the family's move to her grandmother's house and her grandmother's death, in turn, led to their leaving. At least three of her stories - The Fig Tree, Old Mortality, and Old Order are recognizably set in Kyle with her grandmother's house - where she lived with her father and siblings - featured prominently. Because the house is closely associated with one of America's greatest authors at an impressionable time in her life and because it figures in her work as the setting in some of our nation's most important literature, the Katherine Anne Porter House is nominated to the National Register under Criterion B at the national level of significance.

Historic Associations with Katherine Anne Porter

Katherine Anne Porter is universally regarded as one of America's greatest 20th-century authors but the rural Central Texas of her childhood was an unlikely training ground for her sophisticated talents. A native of Texas, she was born in Indian Creek in 1890 but moved with her father, brother and two sisters to Kyle in 1892 when she was only two years old. Her mother had died only a few months after giving birth to a younger sister Mary Alice and the remaining family members moved in with Porter's grandmother Catherine Ann Skaggs Porter, "Aunt Cat", in the newly platted railroad town of Kyle. There she spent the next ten years - the longest period she would live anyplace in her life. Although Katherine Anne Porter only lived in the house during the earliest part of her life, she used personal experiences from that period in her later stories. Several of her short stories are almost autobiographical, taking place in Kyle and the surrounding area (Williams 1994: B- 6). Among those set in the Kyle region are The Fig Tree, The Old Order, Old Mortality, and The Source, which are considered to be some of her best short fiction.

The Porter family legacy in Texas and Hays County dates to the early 1850s when Aunt Cat and her husband Asbury D. Porter moved to Hays County where they bought a 365-acre farm in 1853 (Stovall 1990).

Katherine's father, Harrison Boone Porter, was born to the couple in Hays County before they moved to Louisiana for the duration of the Civil War. After the war, the family returned to Hays County and Harrison attended military school in San Antonio. Asbury Porter began buying farmland throughout the Mountain City area, the center of population in the region before the arrival of the railroad. Although Porter owned a great deal of farmland in Hays County, he left his widow in poverty and his property was divided among so many heirs and other recipients that no single parcel had significant value (Stovall 1990).

Katherine Anne's mother also came from an old Central Texas family. Mary Alice Jones was born in Luling, a small agricultural center in Caldwell County, just east of Hays County, in 1857. A Methodist, she enjoyed a good education at the Coronal Institute in San Marcos, the Hays County seat. Later, the Jones family moved to Indian Creek, near Brownwood, where Harrison Porter and Mary Alice were married in her parents' home in 1883 (Stovall 1990). The couple moved briefly to Hays County where daughter Gay was born but they returned to Indian Creek in 1885 where they lived on land given to them by Alice's father. Two sons were born to the couple; Harrison Paul in 1887 and Johnnie who died in 1890. That year, on May 15, Katherine was born (Stovall 1990). She was christened Callie Russell after a friend of her mother's. Happiness for the Porters was short-lived. Alice was weakened and two years later, following the birth of her daughter Mary Alice on January 25, 1892, she died on March 20 at the age of thirty-three, only two months before Callie's (Katherine Anne's) second birthday. Harrison Porter packed up the four children and took them to his mother's house in Kyle (Givner 1982: 39).

It is thought that Aunt Cat Porter was already living in the house when Harrison brought the family to Kyle but the deed records show that it was owned by Flora Storts and Ezekial Nance until 1893. The property had originally been sold to Flora L. Storts by an agent of the Texas Land Company on behalf of John S. Barnes and Jacob S. Wetmore in 1884. Subsequently, Ms. Storts married Ezek. al E. Nance. It is not known if the Nance's built the house in the 1880s or simply held the property for speculation. The house was probably built during the 1880s and perhaps the Nance's rented the house to Mrs. Porter or had another arrangement with her. Author Joan Givner stated that Aunt Cat purchased the 110' x 115' lot (lots 5 and 6 combined) when they were sold at auction at the town's inception (Givner 1982: 42). In any event, the Nance's transferred the title to Harrison Porter on January 2, 1893 (Stovall 1990).

By the time the Harrison Porter family arrived in Kyle, the town population had grown to more than 500 citizens including four doctors, two dentists, two blacksmiths, two painters, and a lawyer. Twenty-five businesses lined the International & Great Northern (I & GN) Railroad tracks that ran north and south along the eastern edge of the town. Among them were three general stores, a furniture store, and a livery stable. The little town even had a hotel (Givner 1982:42).
If Kyle was thriving, however, the Porters were not. Porter's biographer, Joan Givens has stated that with the family's move to Kyle, their lives became "pinched, disorderly, and unharmonious". Much of the unpleasantness had to do with money or the lack of it. Porter herself remarked about that period, "How do I know what happened to the money, except that the land was gone?" (Givner 1982: 45). Neither the Harrison Porters nor Aunt Cat had enough money and they sold what land they had to pay the bills and make ends meet. Then, on November 9, 1896, while Harrison, Aunt Cat, and the children were still living in the house, the Nances sold the house to Asbury Manlove Porter, Harrison's youngest brother, of Presidio County. Harrison Porter was known to mismanage his finances and it is possible that his brother was forced to purchase the house for him (Stovall 1990).

Katherine was keenly aware of the family's circumstances and knew that her friends were better off economically and enjoyed a more stable home life than she (Stovall 1990). According to one historian, Porter's grandmother kept alive the privileges she had enjoyed growing up in an affluent Southern family. Katherine Anne Porter's dearest childhood friend continued throughout her life - Erna Schlemmer whose father N.C. Schlemmer came to Kyle in 1889. He was the proprietor of a successful mercantile company and also served as a postmaster. Katherine Anne observed their genteel life and endured the void in hers when the Schlemmer family traveled every other summer to visit relatives in Germany. She later said of Erna and her son, that they were her only childhood friends "the oldest friends, the only people who have known me from the cradle (that is the mother has) and with luck will see me to the grave" (Stovall 1990).

According to biographer Givner, the cramped little house was almost unbearable for the family of six. It had a "combination living and dining room, two bedrooms and a small box room, each opening off the other with no connecting corridor" (Givner 1982: 46). While the description of the house is accurate, it was not unlike many other modest homes in and around Kyle and was certainly more commodious than the two-room cabin at Indian Creek where Katherine was born.
Aunt Cat died in 1901. Asbury Manlove Porter and his wife sold the property to M.A. Johnson (Stovall 1990). The following year the family left Kyle and moved to San Antonio where Callie attended the Thomas School for Girls. There she was exposed to the arts and literature but within a short time, the family moved again, first to Victoria and then to Lufkin, Texas. Between 1902 and 1906 when Callie impetuously got married at the age of sixteen, the girl had lived in four different cities. Thus, Katherine Anne Porter's ten-year sojourn at her grandmother's house in Kyle constituted the only stable home life she had known in her childhood. She would go on to travel and live all over the world, marry and divorce four times, but she would return again and again in her literature to the only home she had ever known as a child.

Porter left her first husband to become an actress and she certainly did have a theatrical bent but she contracted tuberculosis and decided to become a writer during her convalescence. After being released from the sanitarium, she worked as a journalist in Chicago, Denver, and Illinois.
Between 1918 and 1921, Porter lived in Mexico where she became involved in Mexican revolutionary politics. She worked as a journalist and a teacher and wrote several stories set in Mexico including Xochimilco and the Fiesta of Guadalupe. In 1922 she published a study entitled Outline of Mexican Popular Arts and Crafts. She later stated that Mexico gave her back her Texas past. In the late 1920s, Porter traveled in Europe and settled in Paris in the early 1930s where she contributed to leftist journals such as The New Republic and The Nation (http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/kaporter.htm 12/1/2003).

Katherine Anne Porter's first published story was "Maria Concepcion" in Century magazine in 1922. In 1927, "He" appeared in New Masses in 1927, followed by "Magic" in transition and "Rope" in the Second American Caravan, both in 1928. "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall" appeared in transition in 1929 and "Flowering Judas" in Hound and Horn in 1930. Her first collection of short stories was a limited edition of Flowering Judas - only 600 copies - in 1930, with an enlarged publication in 1935. When Porter's Pale Horse, Pale Rider was published in 1939, it received widespread acclaim. The work consisted of three short novels:
"Old Mortality" is a loosely autobiographical piece about a motherless family that comes to live with their grandmother in Kyle, Texas; "Noon Wine", is set on a Texas farm at the turn of the 20th century, and the title piece; and "Pale Horse, Pale Rider", about a love affair between a soldier and a young newspaper woman during the influenza epidemic of World War I. The central character, Miranda, has a family and background that is roughly based on Porter's. In her 1944 collection of six related stories, The Leaning Tower, Miranda's (Porter's) family life is further examined.

In the 1950s, Porter published two volumes of essays, The Days Before (1952) and Defense of Circe (1954), and concentrated on her only novel, the 1962 Ship of Fools, which was published when she was 72. In 1965, Porter published her Collected Stories (Morris, September 6, 1997: B3). Her best-known works, among them Flowering Judas, originally published in 1930 and Pale Horse, Pale Rider, and Noon Wine, first published in 1939, were included in the collection.
Porter's Collected Stories was met with overwhelming acclaim and won both the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the National Book Award for excellence in fiction in 1966 (Mooris, September 6, 1997: B3). The Pulitzer Prizes are the country's most prestigious awards and the most sought-after accolades in journalism, letters, and music. They were first awarded in 1917 by a foundation established by publisher Joseph Pulitzer. Pulitzer stipulated that four awards be given for journalism, four for literature and drama, one for education, and four for travel scholarships. They were established as incentives for excellence (Brennan 1999). Because the collected stories were written primarily in the 1930s and 1940s, the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award may have been more a recognition of Katherine Anne Porter's lifetime contribution to American fiction than for a single work - much less one conceived in the year 1965. Ms. Porter was certainly in good contemporary literary company, however. Previous winners were John Updike for The Centaur (1964) and Saul Bellow for Herzog (1965) and those following were Bernard Malamud for The Fixer (1967) and Thornton Wilder for The Eighth Day (1968) (Brennan 1999). Katherine Anne Porter was undeniably among the country's finest writers of fiction.

Katherine Anne Porter received other awards and recognition for her work. In 1966, her only novel, Ship of Fools, was made into an Oscar-winning film directed by Stanley Kramer and starring Vivien Leigh. It is an allegorical tale of good and evil set aboard a German passenger ship in 1931. Ms. Porter continued to write into the 1970s and published Collected Essays and Occasional Writings (1970) and The Never-Ending Wrong (1977), an account of the infamous trial and execution of anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti. She was the first woman to be named a visiting professor at Washington and Lee University. Katherine Anne Porter died in Silver Spring, Maryland on September 18, 1980. The following is a selected list of Ms. Porter's most influential work throughout her career:

Outline of Mexican Popular Arts and Crafts, 1922
Flowering Judas, 1930-enlarged Flowering Judas and Other Stories, 1935
Hacienda, 1934
Noon Wine, 1937
Pale Horse, Pale Rider, 1939
The Leaning Tower and Other Stories, 1944
The Old Order, 1944
The Days Before, 1952
A Defense of Circe, 1955 Holiday, 1962
The Ship of Fools, 1962
Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter, 1965 Collected Essays and Occasional Writings, 1970 The Never-Ending Wrong, 1977

Ms. Porter's long life spanned nine decades and, as her biographer, Joan Givner has said, she somehow managed to be present when the history of her time was being made. Ms. Porter was born in a log cabin at Indian Creek, Texas and grew up steeped in such vivid lore of the Civil War that she claimed she was "the grandchild of a lost war". She lived through two world wars - nearly dying in the great flu epidemic of World War I - as well as the Korean Conflict and Vietnam. She lived in New York's Greenwich Village during Prohibition and the Roaring Twenties and participated in the Obregon Revolution in Mexico City. A Communist sympathizer, she lived in Berlin during Hitler's rise to power. From Germany, she traveled to Paris where she lived for four years preceding World War II. She roamed the world for much of her life, finally settling in Washington D. C. in her later years. However, the bulk of her fiction was written during her restless decades as she moved from one exotic place to another. Perhaps not surprisingly, the setting of much of her fiction is based on the only stable home she ever knew - her childhood house in Kyle.

Architecture, Katherine Anne Porter's Childhood Home

Although Katherine Anne Porter led an adventurous life that took her to Chicago, Denver, Mexico, New York, Paris, Berlin and finally to the Washington, D.C. area, her impressions of her childhood years in Kyle remained with her always. Many of the characters in Katherine Anne Porter's writings were drawn from the citizens of Kyle and the surrounding Hill Country. Some of the scenes are rather exotic with parrots in cages, orange and lemon trees, strawberries, and fig trees common in the town's gardens (Stovall 1990). There is still a fig tree in the garden of the Katherine Anne Porter House. Other scenes depict a troubled family life. In Pale Horse, Pale Rider, Porter appears to be describing her childhood in the house in a passage recalling a dream:
"... How I have loved this house in the morning before we are all awake and tangled together like badly cast fishing lines. Too many people have been born here, and have wept too much here, and have laughed too much, and have been too angry and outrageous with each other here. Too many have died in this bed already, there are far too many ancestral bones propped up on the mantel-pieces, there have been too damned many antimacassars in this house, she said loudly, and oh, what accumulation of storied dust never allowed to settle in peace for one moment" (Porter 1965: 269).

The Katherine Anne Porter House is also an excellent example of a modest, small-town L-Plan house in late nineteenth-century Kyle. Although exaggerated or disguised, the little house on Center Street appears over and over in Katherine Anne Porter's work. Eleanor Hanover Nance, a native of Kyle, described the house as follows:

It sits on a city block of land, large enough for out-buildings, flower and vegetable gardens, a small orchard, many 'climbing trees' and probably a milk cow and chickens. The front porch was a perfect place to sit in a swing or chair in the late summer evenings after the supper dishes were done, and to listen to the telling of the family tales and or the latest small-town gossip, and for the children to play hide and seek, or to catch fireflies (Stovall 1990).

In her story The Old Order, Katherine Anne Porter describes a similar scene from "Grandmother's House" where she grew up:

In the summer the women sat under the mingled trees of the side garden, which commanded a view of the east wing, the front and back porches, a good part of the front garden and a corner of the small fig grove. Their choice of this location was a part of their domestic strategy. Very little escaped them: a glance now and then would serve to keep them fairly well informed as to what was going on in the whole place (Porter 1965: 326)

The Katherine Anne Porter House is one of 17 L-plan houses identified in the 1994 survey of architectural resources in Kyle (Hardy Heck Moore, 1994). Easily recognized by its L-shaped footprint, it is Texas' most common 19th-century house form. Typically, L-plan houses have front-projecting wings that extend from a side-gabled main building. Most L-plan houses in Texas are of wood-frame construction with weatherboard siding. Although most are relatively modest houses, many display a few of the elaborate late Victorian-era details such as turned porch posts, decorative brackets and window surrounds, spindle friezes, and similar ornamentation that is more typical of grand Queen Anne and Eastlake homes. The entrance to an L-plan house often leads directly into a room of the house with several rooms front-to-back on one side and a single room on the opposite side. The front projecting wing usually consists of one or two rooms in tandem with the rear room serving as a rudimentary kitchen and dining area.

Of the 17 L-plan houses documented in the 1994 Kyle survey, the Katherine Anne Porter House is one of the oldest and the only one with an intersecting hipped roof. Most L-plan houses consist of two intersecting gabled roofs and hipped roof variants are much less common. The Katherine Anne Porter House is an excellent and well-maintained example of the type. Again unlike typical L-plan houses, the main building mass of the Katherine Anne Porter House consists of two rooms instead of one. It is possible that the second room was added at an early date. The front projecting wing of the house is two rooms deep as is common to most L-plan houses. An attached shed roof porch with tongue-and-groove flooring is inset from the wing across the remainder of the front façade. It is supported by chamfered porch posts and pilasters. An attached, shed-roof screened porch wraps around most of the rear façade of the house.

Although some alterations were made over the next century since Katherine Anne Porter lived in the house, it suffered few irreversible changes. Those made during the historic period, including the screening of the rear porch, remained intact in the restoration of the building to reflect the evolution of the building through the historic period. The following list indicates ownership of the Katherine Anne Porter House property - and the occupancy of her immediate family - from the period pre-dating the probable construction of the house to the present:

Chain of Ownership

1884 Texas Land Company to Flora L. Storts (soon afterward, Flora Storts married Ezekial Nance)
*1890 Catherine Ann Skaggs Porter is the occupant of the house
*1892 Harrison Porter and children are occupants of the house
1893 Flora Storts and Ezekial Nance were sold to Harrison Porter
1896 Flora and Ezekial Nance were sold to Asbury Manlove Porter (Harrison's younger brother)
-Ashbury Porter may have been compelled to assume ownership of his mother's house due to his brother's notorious irresponsibility. The direct deed from Flora and Ezekial Nance appears to be a formal transfer of title to Ashbury Porter.
1901 Asbury Manlove Porter sold to M.A. Johnson (a cousin of Porter's)
*1901 Aunt Cat died
*1902 Harrison Porter moved his family to San Antonio
1943-Johnson heirs sold to Bertie Maude and Joseph Strawn
1995- Bertie Maude Strawn sold to Yana and David Bland
2000 - Yana and David Bland to Friends of Hays County Historical Commission Preservation Associates

Present Status

In 1995, David and Yana Bland bought the house and began its restoration. They opened the house as a museum but the restoration and maintenance efforts proved daunting for a private party (Fowler 1998: 24). Two years later, Tom Grimes, head of the creative writing program at Southwest Texas State University, learned that the Katherine Anne Porter house would be offered for sale. He believed the house was an "important legacy to preserve" and thought it might be acquired for a writer-in-residence program (Hill News, Fall 2002). A group of Kyle-area residents led by Bob Barton, a local publisher, established the Katherine Anne Porter Preservation Project to purchase and renovate the house (Fowler 1998: 25). The primary exterior change that had to be rectified was the replacement of the original wooden porch floor and chamfered porch posts. At some time in the past, a concrete floor and turned porch posts had replaced the original's (Morris, September 6, 1997: B-3). However, to prepare the site for public use and literary seminars, substantial funds were needed. Bill Johnson, representing the Burdine Johnson, gifted approximately $300,000 to add extensive landscaping and ensure a historically accurate restoration and Kurt Englehorn, a nephew of Erna Schlemmer, Katherine Anne Porter's childhood friend, donated $600,000 to fund the writer-in-residence program (Knight files, 2000). Today, Preservation Associates of Kyle owns the house and leases it to Southwest Texas State which operates it as a museum and home for writers-in-residence at the university (Hill News, Fall 2002: 10).

In June 2002, First Lady Laura Bush helped dedicate the childhood home of Katherine Anne Porter as a National Literary Landmark. The designation was made by the Friends of Libraries USA and the Library of Congress. The only other National Literary Landmark in Texas is the O. Henry House in Austin. Others across the nation include the Tennessee Williams, William Faulkner, and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings homes (Hill News, Fall 2002: 11).

Summary

Although hers was not a happy or carefree childhood, Katherine Anne Porter's life at her grandmother's house in Kyle formed the foundation for her future literary greatness. Thus, though the house was associated with the author for only ten years, they were of significant consequence. That she was a woman of great talent is undeniable. Porter won the O. Henry Award in 1962 for "Holiday" published in the Atlantic Monthly magazine. In 1966, she won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, an achievement no other author has yet attained. In 1984, her novella Noon Wine was adapted for American Playhouse. The film version, starring Jason Robards and Per Oscarsson, was directed by Sam Peckinpah. Her only novel, Ship of Fools, was made into a major motion picture directed by Stanley Kramer and starring Vivien Leigh. Because the house in Kyle is the home most closely associated with Katherine Anne Porter, one of America's greatest twentieth-century authors, it is nominated to the National Register under Criterion B at the national level of significance.

The Katherine Anne Porter House maintains its architectural fabric to an outstanding degree and excellently reflects the type of modest dwelling that was most typical of small rural towns of Central Texas in the late nineteenth century. It possesses integrity of location, setting, design, workmanship, feeling, materials, and association to a remarkable extent and is therefore nominated to the National Register of Historic Places under Criterion C at the local level of significance, as well.