A new framework for talking history
Reopening of historic Kellum-Noble House includes slavery topic
When the Heritage Society reopens the historic Kellum-Noble House this week, it will not only give visitors access to the city’s oldest surviving structure again, but also will address a topic that many Southern house museums have been uncomfortable with: slavery.
The Kellum-Noble House — the city’s oldest structure still on its original foundation — closed in 2014 for extensive repairs that will total $2.3 million when the porches are completed.
When touring the centerpiece of Sam Houston Park’s collection of historic homes, guests will hear about more than the home’s owners, the Kellums and the Nobles. Docents will discuss the slaves who lived and worked there.
“The Heritage Society has skirted around a few of the more uncomfortable facts about the house,” Heritage Society curator Ginger Berni said. “As a historian, I believe it’s important to speak to those facts, and they are that the Kellums had slaves. This was well before the Civil War. (Nathaniel Kellum) had industries that he operated, and he had white immigrant workers as well as slaves in his brickyard.”
The slaves were sometimes contracted out to others who needed their labor.
House museums have traditionally celebrated an individual or historic location, Berni said, citing Mount Vernon, the Virginia home of our first president, George Washington.
“They saved his home because of him and preserved it and celebrated him,” she said, “but over the years they started to talk about all of the other people who lived there, including slaves, which gives you a more accurate picture of what that house and location represents. It is happening all over the country that historians are taking a second look at properties and trying to be more complete about the picture and the history they present.”
Kellum moved to a fledgling Houston in 1839 just a couple of years after the city itself was founded. He opened a lumber and brickyard, and in 1847 built what was likely the grandest home in the city, an L-shaped masonry structure whose bricks were made of mud from the banks of Buffalo Bayou.
After a couple of years, Kellum shut down his businesses and moved to Grimes County and took his family and slaves with him. Eventually, Abram and Zerviah Noble, a widow and widower who married and blended their families, bought the home and its 13 acres.
The Nobles came with their own group of slaves, using them as collateral when they bought the home, so their names were listed in the deed and property transactions: Frank, 36; Willis, 26; “Doc” or Ambrose, 28; Mary, 22, and her children, Sam, 3, and Jake, 2. Harriet, 14, was listed as “also a child of Mary.” The slaves’ names will appear on a large plaque in the house, a permanent reminder that their own story is intertwined with the story of the home and its owners.
Zerviah was from a wealthy Connecticut family, so when the Nobles’ marriage dissolved more than a decade later, she and her daughter from her first marriage kept the home and land and some of their slaves. The divorce documents show that the couple fought over one slave, a boy named George.
Broadening history
Daina Ramey Berry is the associate dean of Graduate Education Transformation and the Oliver H. Radkey Regents professor of History at the University of Texas. Part of her work — with UT colleagues Anthony L. Brown and Keffrelyn D. Brown — is the Teaching Texas Slavery Project, launched in late 2018 to work with schools and others to broaden the scope of the history we learn about where we live.
She noted that many Southern museums and house museums are just starting to address slavery. In mid-2018, Monticello, the home of founding father Thomas Jefferson opened a room devoted to Sally Hemings after years of grappling with how to talk about Jefferson’s relationship with the enslaved woman who was 30 years his junior and the mother of several of his children.
At Montpelier, the home of founding father James Madison and his wife, Dolley, the lives of slaves who served three generations have been talked about for a while, but a new permanent exhibition, “The Mere Distinction of Color,” opened in June 2017 and elevated the conversation, said Elizabeth Chew, Montpelier’s executive vice president and chief curator. The Montpelier exhibit has earned six significant national history awards and numerous calls from other museum curators with questions about how they, too, can tell a more thorough story.
It’s important to include the topic of slavery and the stories of enslaved people, Berry said, if we want an accurate story of how our society and culture has evolved.
“A number of people will be extremely uncomfortable and say this is in the past and we shouldn’t have these conversations, but they inform where we are and where we have been,” she said.
“If you exclude the story of people who were instrumental in the lives of the people at the house, then you won’t understand their life. We know the Kellums owned slaves, and the way the house functioned revolved around the enslaved people serving them.”
Renovation setbacks
Work on the Kellum-Noble House took much longer than expected, in part due to complications of Hurricane Harvey. The house itself didn’t flood, but flooding elsewhere caused a shortage of labor and materials, which drove up the cost of both, said David Bucek of Stern and Bucek Architects, who worked on the restoration work.
An additional wrinkle came earlier this year when financial struggles forced the Heritage Society to cut its full-time staff to part time, relying on volunteers to keep the park open.
The group’s staff and board started raising money in 2013, and in the summer of 2014, the furnishings in the house were removed so that work could begin.
Bucek, who worked on the restoration of NASA’s original Mission Control and shared in the National Trust for Historic Preservation President’s Award that it earned, said the current work at the Kellum-Noble House was based in part on Historic American Buildings Survey drawings created during the Great Depression. The government created jobs for architects and draftsmen who were tasked with creating simple but thorough drawings of historic buildings that would then be stored in the Library of Congress. As a pre-Civil War building, the Kellum-Noble House was included and the resulting structural drawings were the earliest official documents the Heritage Society could find as they launched their most recent work.
One example is the exterior color of the home, painted white with black shutters, as shown in the HABS drawings.
Steel rods were inserted into the structure to keep it from bowing out, and the foundation repair — filling in a crawl space — virtually turned into an archaeological dig that uncovered thousands of artifacts, from old German marbles to chalk and slate used by students.
When they started finding items underneath the house, Bucek said, they called in the Houston Archaeological Society to help.
“As we were removing the dirt we just started finding things, little pieces that looked important,” Berni said. “I’m not a trained archaeologist, but I can recognize a piece of pottery that looks fancy and say, ‘Wait a minute.’”
“One of the neatest things we found was a piece of transferware that was popular in the mid-1800s. One pattern, Texian Campaign, was produced in England to honor the Texas Republic,” Berni said.
A city park
When the Nobles first moved in, Zerviah Noble taught classes in English, music and painting and by 1871 she operated the city’s first public school with a few dozen students.
She died in 1894, the City of Houston bought the property in 1899 and created the city’s first public park. For a short time the site even had a zoo, with a variety of small animals like opossums, geese, ducks and even a pair of wolves named King and Queen, Berni said. Originally it was called City Park, but the downtown site has been called Sam Houston Park since the start of the 20th century. For a time, it housed the city’s park department offices.
Over time, nine other buildings were moved to Sam Houston, including the 1868 Pillot House, the 1870 Yates House, the 1891 St. John Church, a Fourth Ward Cottage and a structure they call the Old Place, a roughhewn cedar home built in 1823 on the banks of Clear Creek and moved to the park in 1973 to be restored.
By the 1950s, though, the Kellum-Noble was crumbling under its own weight, a victim of the climate and shifting soil, Bucek said.
Historic preservationists Faith Bybee and Marie Phelps, as well as architect Harvin C. Moore founded The Heritage Society in 1954 to preserve the Kellum-Noble House. Charter members included other notable names: Ima Hogg, Birdsall P. Briscoe and Kenneth Franzheim.
Their aim grew over time, and a subcommittee left to create a new entity, what is today Preservation Houston, to work on behalf of preservation issues throughout the city.