Three bedrooms, near-equal. Two full baths up, powder down. The island questions, answered before you ask.
In the small hours of 13 November 1885, a foundry on the Strand caught fire with a north gale behind it. By daylight the flames had chewed a strip four blocks wide clear across the island, over Broadway and down to Avenue O, and the corridor between 19th and 20th Streets was inside it. Six hundred houses were gone. Fifteen hundred people had nowhere to sleep. And Phillipina Blum, a forty-year-old widow who made dresses for a living, was looking at a city that suddenly, badly, needed places to live.
She had earned the right to be unsentimental about fire. Born in Lampertheim, Germany, in 1845 and carried to Galveston as an infant, she was one of eight children of Michael W. Shaw, the watchmaker who opened the first jewelry store in Texas at Strand and 23rd in 1855, lost it to the great fire of 1869, rebuilt it, and went on to sell Sam Houston a walking cane studded with silver. Fires, in this family, were something you rebuilt after.
By January 1883 she was advertising in the Galveston Daily News as Mrs. Joseph Blum, Fashionable Dressmaker, from an upstairs room on Market Street. Six months later Joseph, a Swiss-born clothing clerk who as a young man had boarded in the household of Henry Rosenberg, died in Austin. Rosenberg, the banker whose name is still on the library, closed his bank for the afternoon out of respect — not a thing bankers do for clerks unless they mean it.
Seven weeks after the fire, on 3 January 1886, she bought the north half of this lot from a Mrs. Babette Levy. The insurance map drawn the year before shows the Blums living next door on the south half, with a corner grocery where this house now stands; the map drawn three years later shows her old lot empty and this one carrying two brand-new houses, the larger facing Avenue K and the smaller one facing 20th Street. The county booked them in 1887 as $2,500 in improvements. She did not move in. She built them to rent, and rent them she did for three decades, while she lived with her sister and brother-in-law on Broadway. An 1897 insurance record lists what a tenant got for the money: two stories, a metal roof, seven rooms, two halls, two closets, two brick chimneys, and a bathroom. In 1897 the bathroom was the headline.
In 1919 she gave the house to family. Her niece Mary Shaw Tiernan moved in with her husband Edward, who ran the sack-goods department at the Wheat Export Company, and their son, who sold clothing downtown. Edward died; Mary stayed. The directories list her here, alone, year after year, until 1960 — four decades of one family's Christmases under this roof. Phillipina, meanwhile, at seventy-three, having lost a husband and a neighborhood to fire, married a man who sold fire extinguishers for a living. Whether that was irony or insurance, the file does not say. She outlived him too, and died in August 1930 at eighty-four, at the Letitia Rosenberg Home for Aged Women — endowed by the same banker who had closed his doors for her first husband forty-seven years earlier. She is buried at Evergreen Cemetery, a charter member of the Daughters of the Confederacy, a stalwart of the St. Mary's Orphanage auxiliary, and the woman who put this house here.
All of that happened on a block that was, in 1886, a few hundred yards from open water. Hitchcock's Bayou, a brackish inlet off the Gulf, cut inland between 20th and 23rd Streets until the city filled it during the grade-raising that followed the Great Storm of 1900 — the deadliest natural disaster in U.S. history. Nearly 2,000 buildings on this side of the island were jacked up by hand, block by block, between 1904 and 1911, while a 17-foot seawall went in along the Gulf. A house built in 1886, standing in the raised zone, almost certainly went through that lift with its neighbors, which is part of why a 140-year-old house on this block still stands square. When the next big one hit in 1915, the seawall and the fill held, and the island lost 8 lives instead of thousands.
The neighborhood that grew back over the filled bayou took the name Lost Bayou. Locally designated a historic district in 1994 and expanded in 2004, it went onto the National Register of Historic Places in 2017 — 23 blocks of modest, well-built Victorian and early 20th-century homes between Broadway and Avenue M½. This house predates the district's name, the seawall, and the storm that caused both.
Houses like this one last because somebody, in every generation, decides they are worth the trouble. A widow with a plan in 1886. A family that stayed forty years. The owners who rebuilt both galleries, replaced the crawl enclosures, and kept a slate roof over the whole thing. It has sheltered people for a hundred and forty years, through the fire that made it necessary and the storm that remade the island around it, and it is standing here, square and painted, ready for whoever is next.
None of this is legend. It comes from a file compiled by Jami Durham, property historian at the Galveston Historical Foundation: city directories year by year, census pages, Sanborn fire-insurance maps from 1885 to 1950, the newspaper clippings, the deed notice, and her death certificate. It is posted here in full, and it is a better read than most novels set on this island.
Windstorm, flood, rental rules, historic review, parking. Every house on Galveston Island comes with the same list, and most listings make you ask. Here it is up front — the house first, the island below.
Eleven labeled rooms across two floors. Entry, living room, dining room, kitchen and powder room are down. All three bedrooms and both full baths are up. Note the two staircases: one off the kitchen, one off the entry hall, so the second floor is reachable two ways.
Room dimensions are from the listing floor plan and are approximate. Buyer should independently verify all measurements.
Nothing in an 1886 Galveston house is decorative by accident. Every odd feature is an answer to heat, water, wind or fire. Here is the walk, and the reason for each thing you'll notice.
The house stands on brick piers, and you can see them at the base of the skirting. In 1886 that was simple sense: a floor held off the ground stays dry when the street floods, air moves underneath it in August, and a pier can be shimmed square when the island's sand shifts, which it does. That is why the living floor sits at 11.8 feet on the elevation certificate, and why the enclosure below it has flood openings rather than a solid wall. Water is meant to pass through, not push. The seller replaced those crawl enclosures; the piers are doing what they've done since Phillipina paid for them.
Two galleries, one over the other, both rebuilt. A gallery is not a porch. It is the house's outdoor room and its awning at once: it shades the front wall so the rooms behind it never take direct sun, and on a still night in 1886 the upper one was where you slept. Above them, a hipped roof, pitched on all four sides so a hurricane finds no gable end to lift. On it, slate. After the 1885 fire the city had strong feelings about wooden roofs; the 1897 insurer noted this one as metal, and it is slate today. Neither burns. The brick chimney on the ridge is the last of the two the 1897 record counted.
Every window carries a pair of louvered shutters that actually close. Closed and latched, they are the storm shutters the seller's disclosure lists. Closed on a July afternoon, they cut the sun and still let air through the slats. Open, they frame windows that run nearly floor to ceiling on the ground floor, two-over-two sash with both halves movable. Drop the top sash a few inches and hot air leaves; raise the bottom and cooler air comes in low. That is the whole air-conditioning plan of 1886, and it still works on the days you'd rather not run the mini-splits.
The door has glass in it and a transom over it, and it opens onto a hall seven feet wide and twenty-five feet long that runs straight through the house. This is the side-hall plan, the island's favorite, and it is a wind tunnel on purpose. Open the front door and the back, and a Gulf breeze walks the length of the house without entering a single room. The main stair rises off this hall, and the powder room is tucked under it, in space that would have been a closet or nothing.
Over nearly every interior door there is a small window. That is a transom, and it is the cleverest thing in the house. Heat rises and pools at the ceiling; a transom lets it drift out of a room and down the hall even with the door shut for privacy. It also carries daylight into the hall, which in 1886 had no other source after dark but a lamp. They still pivot open, a hundred and forty years on. Leave them.
The ceilings run twelve feet and better, for the same reason the transoms exist: the higher the ceiling, the farther the hot air is from your head. Tall ceilings, tall windows and transoms are one system, not three features. Underfoot, the original wide pine boards, the wood this island was built out of, with the wear of a hundred and forty years in them. They were laid tight over the joists with air below, which is why a pier-and-beam floor feels different from a slab, and why it has lasted.
Two rooms of almost the same size, joined by a cased opening wide enough to make one long room of them, with pocket doors that still slide out of the wall and meet in the middle. Closed, you heated one room in January. Open, you seated a table for twelve. Both rooms have windows on two walls because the house is only two rooms wide and sits on a corner: no room in it is more than one wall from outside air.
Kitchens went at the back of a Victorian house, as far from the parlor as the lot allowed, because the kitchen was where the fire and the heat lived. This one still is, twenty-three feet long down the side of the house, with beadboard on the walls and ceiling, which was the practical wall finish of the day: cheap, paintable, and it shrugged off steam. The island, the gas range and the pantry are this century's. The transom over the back door is not.
In the back corner of the kitchen a narrower stair climbs directly to the primary bedroom. A grand house called that the servants' stair. In a rental house built by a widow, it meant a lodger could come down for coffee, or go up to bed, without walking through anyone's parlor, and it meant the person cooking could reach a sick child without crossing the house. Two stairs in 1,872 square feet is unusual. It is also the reason the second floor works as two separate worlds when you need it to.
Three bedrooms and two baths off a hall that repeats the one below. The bedrooms connect to one another as well as to the hall, which is how Victorian houses managed air and family: doors open in summer, the breeze crosses the whole floor; doors shut in winter, each room holds its own warmth. Closets were an afterthought in 1886, so the ones here are later, and their louvered doors are there to keep what's inside from mildewing in island air.
The front bathroom has a clawfoot tub, beadboard wainscot, and a pair of shuttered doors that open straight onto the upper gallery. Those doors are the giveaway that this room began life as a front bedroom: the best room in the house, with its own door to the night air. Someone with taste turned it into a bathroom and left the doors. Open them, fill the tub, and you will understand the whole building.
The side gallery steps land on a brick walk and a brick patio, laid from the kind of brick the island paved itself with. The detached carriage house at the back, shared with the neighbor, sits where a back building always sat on a Galveston lot, in the alley. Stand here and look at the house from the side: clapboard, piers, shutters, galleries, hipped roof. It is a machine for living comfortably on a hot, wet, windy island before electricity, and it still runs.
* Square footage and lot size are from the Galveston Central Appraisal District. † Year built, roof type and tax rate are from the MLS record; the appraisal district attributes the 1886 build year to the seller rather than to its own records, and taxes without exemptions were $6,572 for 2022. The seller's disclosure lists the roof as slate with no previous roof repairs and marks its age unknown. ‡ The seller's disclosure marks central air conditioning and central heat without stating fuel type or unit count. Room dimensions are from the listing floor plan and are approximate. Buyer should independently verify all measurements. Why the appraisal district and the floor plan disagree.
This is not a suburban house and you are not a commuter. Whether you are buying a second home, a rental, or a place to live year-round, these six items decide whether the deal closes. They are answered here in the order they kill contracts.
All six pages, exactly as the seller filled them out and signed them on 28 July 2023. Read it before you visit rather than after. Everything below is drawn from it; nothing is softened.
Kelli Owens
Texas REALTOR® · The KO Realty Group
TREC License #616346
The Sears Group
Licensed Texas Real Estate Broker · TREC License #9008344
Christopher Sears, Designated Broker · TREC License #457682
No form, no call center, no lead-routing service selling your information three times before it reaches an agent. These go to my phone.
