Four Outstanding Preservation Organizations in Texas Recognized
In April, the Texas Historical Foundation honored four organizations for their outstanding work to preserve places important to the history of Texas. Following a rigorous selection process that considered dozens of nominees from across the state, the top organizations received recognition at the inaugural Michael C. Duda Preservation Awards ceremony held in Dallas. The awards, named in honor of architect and late Texas Historical Foundation Board Member Michael C. Duda, focus on recognizing sustained excellence in historic preservation by nonprofit organizations in Texas. With the recognition came a monetary award for each winning organization to support their continued good work. The top monetary award was $100,000 and these awards will be transformative for each organization and their work to preserve important places that tell the diverse story of Texas. Each of the organizations and their projects are unique and showcase what a determined group can do to save everything from a rural schoolhouse to commercial buildings.

Chisholm Trail Heritage Museum
Since opening in 2013, Cuero’s award-winning Chisholm Trail Heritage Museum has served as an example of excellence in museum programming and a commitment to preserving historic architecture. Their long track record of the immaculate restoration of significant local architecture has made indelible contributions to Cuero.
The Museum’s home is the two-story Knights of Pythias Hall constructed in 1903 in Cuero’s historic downtown. The building was in bad shape when the Museum purchased it and they spent years rehabilitating it to serve as a world-class museum focusing on the ranching history of the Guadalupe River Valley. The museum exhibits include Texas spurs, Plains Indian Art, a chuck wagon, and equipment made and used by cowboys. The Museum regularly provides educational programming and hosts community wide events.
The first floor of the museum houses the interpretive exhibits, while restoration of the existing rooms on the second floor, including the original lodge hall for the Knights, allows for temporary exhibits and meeting space. The Museum also restored a circa 1880 English-German school building and an 1892 Victorian-style house which are connected to the Museum through park space often used for community gatherings.
Their latest endeavor will expand the museum campus, adding 14,000 square feet of exhibition and community space through the rehabilitation of the adjacent 1894 Trautwein and 1920 Cook & Day buildings adjacent to the museum. The award funding will help the Museum sensitively restore the exterior of the buildings to their period of historic significance. This work has been years in the making and underlines the potential of historic preservation to restore vitality to rural downtowns.
Left Flower Hill Center board members and volunteers. Right Known as Flower Hill, the historic 1877 Smoot residence is the centerpiece of the Urban Farmstead Museum in Austin. The museum features three centuries’ worth of furnishings, textiles, and texts; a gorgeous Texas wildscape, which is home to six historic out-buildings, ponds, and rockeries; and the whole Smoot family story.
Flower Hill Center
The Flower Hill Center operates the Urban Farmstead Museum, based in the historic 1877 Smoot residence known as Flower Hill. Reverend Dr. Richard Kelly Smoot first arrived in Austin from Bowling Green, Kentucky, in 1874 to assist the fledgling Southern Presbyterian Church of Austin. He returned to Austin permanently in 1876 to serve as minister of the church. Smoot drew up plans for his house on a hill overlooking the town of Austin and by 1877 moved into his new home with his wife and two sons. Over four decades, the house grew from four rooms to fourteen through a series of additions. The grounds included many outbuildings, such as a chicken coop, lumber room, carriage house, and stables.
The Smoot family was heavily engaged in the arts and civic service of growing Austin. Smoot even formed the Austin School of Theology in the house’s library. The school outgrew the house to become the Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary. Flower Hill flourished with visiting relatives, civic leaders, artists, students, professors, and religious leaders. The house often served as a location for entertaining and dinners with the favorite dish of oysters and watermelon.
Jane Smoot was the last of the Smoot descendants to live in the house and was a lifelong educator teaching English in Austin’s public schools. She carried on her family’s legacy by maintaining the house until she passed away in 2013. Wanting Flower Hill and her family’s legacy to survive, Jane left the house to a foundation for them to preserve and open as a house museum. That foundation is now the Flower Hill Center and they have worked tirelessly to honor Jane’s vision, care for the extensive collection of family artifacts, and maintain the house and grounds. The Center’s goal is for the house to be used for tours, artist residencies, and native land cultivation efforts dedicated to the Smoot family’s legacy of civic engagement and conservation.
The same features that contribute to the house’s historic and architectural significance have also proved to be a hurdle. Structural issues from the nearly 150-year-old limestone and brick foundation have effectively halted programming and public access to the house. The Flower Hill Center will use the award funds to stabilize the foundation to allow them to open the house to the public and support their mission to enrich public understanding of Austin’s history and one of Austin’s leading families.
Left Members of the Michael C. Duda family and the Texas Historical Foundation board of directors. Right Friends of the Wheelock School House in front of the historic four-room schoolhouse that once served the children of Robertson County.
Friends of Wheelock School House
In the tiny community of Wheelock, population around 200, sits a four-room schoolhouse with an auditorium that once served the children of Robertson County. Built in 1908, the structure served as a school until the 1940s when consolidation of rural schools occurred. The residents of Wheelock didn’t give up on the school when it closed. Instead of letting it fall to ruin, they opened it to the community for events, meetings for groups like the 4H and women’s quilting clubs, and for hosting weddings, birthday parties, and family reunions. Over time, the architecturally significant structure deteriorated due to a lack of resources available in the small community to preserve the building. The building faced demolition in the 2010s because of the poor condition.
The Wheelock community felt the building was too important to lose and formed the Friends of the Wheelock School House in 2016 with a mission to save the structure and keep it open for community use. The task was daunting with such a large building, the number of repairs needed, and no deep pockets in the community to fund the work.
The small but determined group forged ahead and enlisted the help of the nearby Texas A&M University Center for Heritage Conservation to figure out what steps needed to be taken to preserve the building. A&M students documented the building and prepared reports outlining the work to be done. The Friends group built a lasting relationship with the Center, transforming the school building into a learning lab for Texas’ next generation of architects and preservationists to hone their skills.
A major project was the restoration of the original windows with the A&M students surveying each window to develop a restoration plan, even determining the original paint color. With a grant from the Texas Historical Commission, the Friends group hired a historic window craftsman who painstakingly restored all the original windows and made them operational again. To replace the worn roof, which was letting water into the building, the group acquired a grant from the county to install a new roof. Additional work has included stabilizing the foundation, upgrading the electrical system, and installing a new accessible bathroom.
The award funds will continue the exterior restoration work, focusing on the repair or replacement of the exterior wood clapboard siding where needed and scraping and painting the entire building to return it to its original white color. The work of Friends of the Wheelock School House is truly inspirational and shows that a small grassroots community group with a lot of determination can make a difference in preserving a historic structure so important to Wheelock’s past and future.
Rutherford B.H. Yates Museum
Since 1996, the Rutherford B.H. Yates Museum has led the charge to protect Houston’s Freedmen’s Town Historical District, maintaining the highly threatened material history of one of the largest urban settlements of formerly enslaved individuals in the nation. The Museum’s decades of interdisciplinary work uncovered what is among the most complete example of a Freedmen’s town in the state of Texas, drawing into focus a detailed portrait of this critical piece of our history.
Post-emancipation, a large population of formerly enslaved settled in the Fourth Ward of Houston on the south side of Buffalo Bayou. It became known as Freedmen’s Town and began with small, vernacular frame houses. Over the years, the community’s unique architecture, history, and culture evolved as an early nineteenth-century urban site worthy of a National Register of Historic Places designation in 1985. In 2019, UNESCO included the site on their Route of Enslaved Peoples. Even with the designations, insensitive mass redevelopment, demolitions of historic structures, and indifference to the community’s historic significance have created difficulties for preservation efforts.
To preserve the community, the Rutherford B.H. Yates Museum, Inc. organized and built its work on three pillars – preservation, education, and archaeology. Rutherford B.H. Yates was the son of Jack Yates, a founding father of Freedmen’s Town and the first pastor of Antioch Baptist Church. The daughter of Rutherford B.H. Yates Sr., Olee Yates McCullough, recognized the historical and cultural value of her family home and Freedmen’s Town and founded the museum. The Museum has recruited hundreds of volunteers to work on restoring the buildings and has helped to educate thousands about the value of preserving the legacy of this important community.
The Rutherford B.H. Yates House (right bottom) built in 1912 underwent a restoration in 1996 and honors Yates and his work as the owner of Yates Printing Company. The 1907 J. Vance Lewis & Pauline Gray-Lewis Home is nearing completion of its restoration and will serve as a museum of law and education in honor of J. Vance Lewis who was an attorney. After restoration, the 1911 Jacob Nicholson House now serves as a home for archaeological instruction and fieldwork programs through a cooperative agreement between the Yates Museum and Lone Star College.
While modern-day Houston continues to develop around Freedman’s Town, the ongoing work of the Rutherford B.H. Yates Museum represents the best chance of understanding the district in its totality. The award funds will go towards restoring the Isabelle Simms cottage (right top) using the Museum’s signature nuanced approach. It will be used as a launching point for visitors and play a key role in allowing them to interpret this dynamic and complex collection of historic sites. The Simms cottage is significant as it was owned by a widow who worked as a domestic servant and who purchased the land by herself in 1874.
The four Micheal C. Duda Preservation Award-winning organizations, while diverse in geography and purpose, are aligned in their uncompromising dedication to serving their communities by preserving the places that connect us to our shared past. Each exemplifies the transformative qualities that historic preservation offers—the fellowship and pride of place inherent to experiencing our collective heritage as Texans. The Texas Historical Foundation congratulates the winners and looks forward to the completion of their projects.
Videos featuring the stories of the top three award-winning organizations can be found on the Texas Historical Foundation website at texashistoricalfoundation.org.
