PRESERVATION HOME TOUR DIVES INTO SOUTH AUSTIN
Thought to have once been the grain mill for the Bouldin estate, Millbrook is filled with colorful architectural details.
The story goes that Nancy Whitworth lives in the old grain mill for the Bouldin estate that once covered South Austin from the river to what is now Ben White Boulevard. Millbrook, as it’s called, is one of six Bouldin pro pertiesonthisyear’sPres- ervation Austin Historic Homes Tour on April 29. Other stops include the Texas School for the Deaf, two 1930s Craftsman bungalows, an 1899 Victorian home and a 1951 house that has been renovated in a modern style.
Whitworth has found pictures in the Austin History Cen-
ter of her house with dirt floors on the bottom level where cows were hanging out. The actual millstone has never been found, and the creek that once powered the mill only arrives in wet weather.
“It was not a very successful mill,” she says.
She’s been told Millbrook was built in 1852, but some records say it might have actually been built the decade before — other experts put it much younger, closer to the turn of the century.
When it became a house is up for debate, too. The official story is that William Carroll “Cal” Roy and his wife, Annie Stanley Roy, bought it from Powhatan Bouldin, heir to the James E. Bouldin estate in 1894, and had it converted into a home.
The Roy descendants then sold it to two University of Texas drama professors, Ernest Randolph Hardin and his wife, Maurine, in 1939. That’s when the house got its colorful details.
Ernest Hardin was a collector of architectural castasides. Throughout this house are architectural pieces from Abner Cook houses, an East Austin church, the Driskill Hotel and places yet unknown. Its “Millbrook” weather vane actually came from a farm in Millbrook, N.Y., where Hardin made a deal with the farmer to bring the vane home to Austin.
The last time the house was opened for a home tour a few years after Whitworth and her late husband, Will Spong, bought it in 1993, visitors told her all kinds of stories about colorful parties that seem to match the murals Hardin painted downstairs.
The home is one of five buildings on the property that cover different eras. Another house was torn down after it became uninhabitable, probably sometime in the 1980s. Whitworth discovered that building existed when she was cutting back English ivy and found a gate, a stacked rock wall and steps leading to what seemed like nowhere. The history center later confirmed that there had been another house on the property, one that Hardin used as his art studio.
University of Texas architecture students also studied the property and came up with the theory that a rock house, which is now a guest house, was once the smokehouse for the Bouldin estate.
When Whitworth and Spong bought the property it was advertised in the paper as “for sale as is.” Someone before them had purchased it with the intent to restore it but had not gotten very far.
The property came with a giant trash pile in the front yard and a house that was torn up inside. “It was in very bad shape,” Whitworth says. They had to redo all the plumbing and electrical, and they restored many of the architectural details.
“We wanted something unusual, but we were not looking for a major renovation project,” Whitworth says. “Neither of us had a hammer or a screwdriver.”
It’s been a 24-year project, one that Whitworth says never will be done.
Here are some of the features you’ll see on the tour: