From Civil War to Sutherland Springs, mansion bears witness to Texas history
LA VERNIA — Driving south along County Road 539 below Seguin, through rolling spring-green pasture land softened by stands of oak, mesquite and hackberry, you come over a rise and notice off to the left a stately mansion of tancolored sandstone trimmed in white. With a spacious front yard enclosed by a white picket fence and shaded by majestic oaks, with Texas and American flags flying out front, the old house is an attentiongetter, to be sure.
Called Whitehall, the twostory structure was built in the late 1840s by a native New Yorker named Joseph Henry Polley, one of Stephen F. Austin’s Old 300. Robin and Keith Muschalek bought it in 2015. Keith, a retired Army colonel and native Texan, and Robin, a former teacher who lived in upstate New York as a youngster, are happily restoring their antebel-
lum mansion to its former glory.
Ask Robin if it’s haunted, and she’ll cover her eyes, stifle a giggle and say she doesn’t want to talk about ghosts, even though — or maybe because — she knows about Polley descendants alluding to “haints” in the house in correspondence more than a century old. She and Keith live in La Vernia but work on restoring the house at all hours of the day and night; they’ve never received a visitation, they told me.
Let’s say there is a Whitehall apparition, one who has enjoyed relaxing through the decades in one of the comfortable rocking chairs on the spacious veranda. From that roadside vantage point, the ghostly shade would have a front-row seat on the cavalcade of Texas history, from the early days of statehood through cattle drives, the Civil War, Emancipation and Reconstruction, the discovery of oil — down through the decades to a recent tragedy nearby that horrified the nation — the man who killed 25 members of the First Baptist Church of nearby Sutherland Springs met his end a few miles north of the house.
From New York to Texas
Polley was born in Whitehall, N.Y., in 1795 and served as a teenage army teamster in the War of 1812. He was one of the first 22 immigrants to follow Austin to Texas in 1821. He was the first sheriff of Austin’s colony, and in the Runaway Scrape in spring 1836, he was assigned to watch over women and children fleeing Santa Anna’s troops.
In 1847, Polley and his wife, Mary Augusta Bailey Polley, moved from their home in Brazoria County to a site on a knoll overlooking the Cibolo Valley, about 2 miles north of Sutherland Springs, in what was then Guadalupe County (now Wilson County). They were the first settlers in an area still raided by Indians.
While the Polleys lived in a temporary “stake house” on the property, a team of 20 slaves quarried hardened sandstone from nearby Elm Creek for the walls of the new house and crushed mussel shells from the creek for lime to mix mortar.
Joseph Polley’s brother, John Polley, drew up the blueprints for the house, using the family home in Whitehall, N.Y., as inspiration. He also purchased doors, sashes, cabinetry, window panes and furnishings in New York for his brother’s new home and had them shipped to the port at Indianola. Ox carts hauled the material to the frontier site.
The house contains eight high-ceilinged rooms, with two grand hallways. Both interior and exterior walls are solid stone, 18 inches thick. Six openpit fireplaces heated the home.
The woodwork is cypress timber hauled in ox-drawn wagons from sawmills near Bandera, about 90 miles to the west. In the attic, the Muschaleks showed me rafters joined together with square nails and cypress pins. The structure is as sturdy as when it was built.
The house was completed by 1854, and the large Polley family (11 children in all) moved in. By that time, Joseph Polley was accumulating vast holdings of land and cattle. Shortly before the war, he owned 150,000 head, more than any rancher in Texas with the exception of the King Ranch. Mary Polley managed the large household.
Despite being a slaveholder, Joseph Polley was a reluctant supporter of the Confederacy. His son, Joseph Benjamin Polley, became a corporal in Company F of the 4th Texas Infantry, which fought under Col. John Bell Hood and Gen. Robert E. Lee. The younger Polley saw action at Gaines’ Mill, Second Manassas, Antietam and Gettysburg and had to have a wounded foot amputated in 1864. He would go on to write “A Soldier’s Letters to Charming Nellie,” published in 1908, and “Hood’s Texas Brigade,” published in 1910.
In February 1861, Lee may have satat a desk in an upstairs bedroom and written his last letter from Texas. “We do like to keep this story alive,” Keith says, “in case we come across evidence someday.”
Deciding what to do
The war wrought financial ruin on the Polleys. Joseph Polley received a pardon from President Andrew Johnson but was unable to rebuild the family’s fortunes before his death in 1869.
Mary Polley turned Whitehall into a boarding house after her husband’s death, catering to the many visitors who came to nearby Sutherland Springs — the Saratoga of the South — to take the cure in the sulfur waters of Cibolo Creek. She lived until 1888.
The mansion stayed in the Polley family until 1907, when it was sold to a Wilson County commissioner. Patillo Higgins of Spindletop fame showed up in the area in 1923; oil was discovered on the property in 1955.
A succession of owners kept Whitehall in relatively good shape until the early 1990s, when an owner who had it for 25 years allowed it to fall into ruin. By the time the Muschaleks bought it in 2015, the roof had blown off, windows were broken out, and what Keith calls “an avalanche of barn swallows” were living in the house.
Keith, who grew up in Pasadena, had passed by the mansion for years on family trips to his grandparents’ house in Yorktown. “I didn’t know what it was,” he told me last week. “I thought maybe it was an old dance hall.”
Robin spent a portion of her childhood in upstate New York, not far from the original Whitehall. “We’ve always worked on our own houses, always loved history,” she said. “We liked the social part and wanted to be involved in something that gave back to the community. We’re still trying to decide what to do with it.”
Preservation and renovation will go on for years. “It’s all about money — that and finding people to do it,” Keith said.
The Muschaleks are thinking they’ll probably make the house available as a venue for weddings, parties and events related to its rich history. They thought about living in the house but decided not to. They know that Abner Hubbard “Hub” Polley, son of Joseph and Mary, refused to live in the family home because, he wrote, it was inhabited by “haints.”
His letter, they assured me, had nothing to do with their decision. I believed them — until they told me about the rocking chair on the veranda that started mysteriously rocking all by itself the other day.