Built in 1902 for physician Dr. Jesse Jonathan Fouts, this Greek Revival residence is documented on Gonzales’s official historic homes tour as a house built of cypress and Florida curly pine. The tour gives the address as 834 Mitchell Street and notes the 1902 construction date. Multiple local guides repeat that the specialty lumber was shipped from Florida and used throughout the structure.
People and context
Jesse Jonathan Fouts was born February 11, 1858, in Green Cove Springs, Florida, to Martin and Annie Gomillion Fouts. He graduated from Tulane in 1886 and practiced in New York, Waelder, and Galveston before settling in the Gonzales area in the 1890s. He became a long-serving local physician and died at his home in January 1936, with services held in the family residence.
Mary Franke Fouts
Mary Franke was born September 24, 1860, to Louis Franke and Bernadine Ramberg Franke. She came to the area in the early 1890s as a music teacher and sang in the First Baptist Church choir, where, according to local tradition, she and Dr. Fouts first shared a hymnal. They married September 10, 1893, in Black Jack, Texas, and raised three sons and one daughter. After Dr. Fouts’s death, Mary moved to Cleburne, sold the property in 1942, and died January 21, 1943. Both are buried in the Gonzales Masonic Cemetery.
House history and materials
Tour and city publications describe the dwelling as a Greek Revival home built of cypress and Florida curly pine. The widely repeated provenance is that the Florida timber was shipped to Texas for the build, consistent with Dr. Fouts’s Florida family ties and the period practice of ordering specialty woods by rail and ship.