Gibbs-Powell House Holds a Long 11th Street Story

The front of the Gibbs-Powell House still gives away its 1862 roots. Square porch columns frame a centered door with a glass transom above it and sidelights beside it. Thomas Gibbs built the Greek Revival house for his family at 1228 11th Street in Huntsville. Though altered over the years, the house still carries those original details.

The address changed jobs as the town changed. It was briefly a rent house and student housing in the 1880s and 1890s. Judge Ben Powell II bought it in 1897. By the time it became a local history museum in 1984, the house had carried more than a century of family life, rented rooms, and town growth under the same roof.

A Recorded Texas Historic Landmark marker followed in 1989. The porch and doorway show the house's age before a visitor reaches that marker, but the sequence is the better story: home, student quarters, judge's residence, museum. Huntsville's large institutions fill plenty of history books; the Gibbs-Powell House keeps a street-level version standing on 11th Street.