The Goodman-LeGrand House: Tyler's Victorian Survivor
Near Tyler, Texas
At six twenty-four North Broadway, behind a semi-circular portico that speaks of deliberate refinement, stands one of the oldest surviving antebellum-era structures in Tyler. The Goodman-LeGrand House, now operated as a museum, is not a ruin maintained for pathos. It is a furnished house that looks very much as though someone recently stepped out.
The house dates to the mid-eighteen hundreds; William Goodman purchased it as a family residence in eighteen seventy-two, during Tyler's earliest decades. It passed through several owners until Sallie Goodman married into the LeGrand family. When William Goodman died in nineteen twenty-one, Sallie inherited the property.
In nineteen twenty-six, she commissioned a comprehensive remodel in the Classic Revival style, the semi-circular porticos were added then, giving the house its present face. When Sallie LeGrand died on October twelfth, nineteen thirty-nine, she bequeathed the house and all her personal journals to the City of Tyler. It became city property in nineteen forty.
The house was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen seventy-six and has been a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark since nineteen sixty-two. The Daughters of the American Revolution designated it a national Historic Site in twenty ten. A major renovation completed in twenty eleven stabilized and restored the structure.
Inside, original furnishings, photographs, and memorabilia dating from the mid-eighteen hundreds give visitors a tangible sense of what domestic life looked like in a prosperous East Texas household across several generations, cotton wealth, family portraits, and the particular quietness of well-kept rooms.
