National Register of Historic Places
Glen Rose Downtown Historic District
Glen Rose, Somervell County, Texas
The record
- Listed
- September 30, 2014
- Type
- Historic district
- Address
- Around courthouse square bounded by Vernon, Walnut, Bernard, Elm & 100 blk., 201, 205 SW. Bernard Sts., Glen Rose
- County
- Somervell
- State
- Texas
- Contributing resources
- 31 buildings, 2 structures, 2 objects
- Coordinates
- 32.23506, -97.75575
- Reference number
- 14000820
USGS Historical Topographic Map Collection
The story
Written by AI from this property's National Register nomination and the record above; every sentence is checked against its sources before it appears here. Corrections: privacy@treealive.com
The Glen Rose Downtown Historic District is a historic district around the courthouse square in Glen Rose, Somervell County, covering blocks bounded by Vernon, Walnut, Bernard and Elm streets. It includes 31 contributing buildings, two contributing structures and two contributing objects, in styles from Late Victorian Romanesque to Craftsman and Art Deco.
Why it's listed
It was listed under criteria A, C and D, with local-level significance in commerce, exploration and settlement, and architecture. The nomination gives its period of significance as 1878 to 1964, reflecting the 1878 recording of the townsite plat.
Physical character
Most contributing buildings are one- and two-part commercial blocks of local limestone or brick, under flat or gabled roofs of composition shingle, slate or galvanized steel. The district also holds a single-pen log house, a concrete ice house and a stone and reinforced-concrete culvert, apart from the commercial storefronts around the square.
Historical context
Charles Barnard arrived on the Paluxy River in 1861 to build a gristmill, and sold it in 1870 to Tyler Calhoun Jordan. Somervell County was created in 1875, and the townsite plat was recorded in 1878. Fire destroyed the wooden buildings on the square's northeast side in 1905, and a 1926 fire destroyed four commercial buildings on Northeast Barnard Street. Glen Rose voters banned the sale of liquor in 1899, a ban that took effect in January 1900.