The McFaddin-Ward House: Oil Money in Marble and Wood

Two blocks east of downtown Beaumont, on a full city block of landscaped grounds, stands a twelve-thousand-eight-hundred-square-foot house that arrived in the world because oil money moved faster than the lumber fortunes it replaced.

The McFaddin-Ward House was built in nineteen oh five and nineteen oh six, just four years after Spindletop, for William McFaddin's sister, Di Averill, and her husband, Colonel W. C. Averill, a cattle and land family whose oil income had made them something considerably more than comfortable. The Averills and the McFaddins swapped homes soon after it was finished. The architect was Henry Conrad Mauer of Beaumont, who designed it in a Beaux-Arts Colonial mode: four massive Ionic columns rising two stories, a colonnade-lined porch wrapping the facade, interiors finished in hardwood and plaster with the confident heaviness of the Gilded Age.

William Perry Herring McFaddin and his wife Ida Caldwell McFaddin moved in with their family in nineteen oh seven and added rooms as their circumstances continued to expand. The family lived in the house for seventy-five years. Three generations came and went through those columns.

The last of them, Mamie McFaddin Ward, died in nineteen eighty-two and established a heritage foundation to open the house as a museum. It opened in March of nineteen eighty-six. The interiors have been restored to reflect the period between nineteen oh six and nineteen fifty, the decades in which the house witnessed Beaumont's full arc from oil boomtown to regional industrial city.

It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen seventy-one and named a Texas State Historic Landmark in nineteen seventy-six. Tours are free and led by docents who have largely memorized the provenance of every piece of furniture in the building. What they are really telling you, in a house this large and this carefully kept, is the story of what the gusher four miles south purchased.