We're not quite ready for a realtor, but are interested in a home in the CS Historic District. Can anyone give me an idea of a general price range for homes in that area and how in demand a home in that area is. TIA!

check out www.316pershing.com

The house is on the corner of Pershing and Park Place right in the middle of the CS Southside Historic Area.

Amazing pics - I wanna see it live and in person!

Thanks for the reply! That certainly is a beautiful home!

I guess I'm looking for one of the charming older homes, not a new construction in that area. I guess from the lack of replies that it's not an "in demand" area...

Good luck finding a house there! They are on the market and then off before you can blink.

Georgia,

College Station does not have a historical district at this time. Southside is the historical area of College Station.

I sold 118 Pershing two years ago for $525,000. The range can be from $200K on the low end upwards of $1MM asking price.

It is very expensive "dirt" as they say.

Good luck in finding what you are looking for.

There's another house on Pershing for sale in the $350,000 range. It is an older house in major need of updating/remodeling. In any other area, that house would be about $300,000 less.

Hottest market in town.
The only downside is your neighbors a couple of blocks away.

Stand by for the history of the Southside Historic District in College Station.

Below is an aerial view of the A&M College campus taken in about 1933. You most probably will spot Kyle Field immediately. Note in the photo to the immediate north and east of Kyle Field numerous houses. Those were homes provided by the college to faculty and staff beginning in 1877 before the city of College Station existed.



In about 1938 or so the decision was made by the college to go out of the family housing business. Familiess occupying those houses were given an opportunity to purchase the houses if they would move them from campus.

Note in the lower part of the photo and east-west "thoroughfare" (gravel road) on the south boundary of the campus. That road would later become Jersey Street, and later still George Bush Drive.

Note on the south side of that road and cornering on Wellborn Road, a housing area laid out and in development. Check a College Station map today and you will recognize Montclair Street and a collection of streets named after cattle breeds. The forested area on the east side of that "subdivision" was a creek bed that would later become Fred Brison Park bounded by East and West Dexter Streets. East Dexter would later be connected with an extension of Coke Street from campus when Jersey Street was formalized.

Many of the houses from campus were moved into the newly platted subdivision. The houses shown in the photo that may still be standing today were probably built on site and before the move out from campus.

After the date of this photo other streets were opened up and other neighborhoods were established. A&M Consolidated School moved to the Jersey Street campus in 1940. Faculty houses were moved from campus as late as the 1950s so houses from the campus are randomly located throughout the southside.

Only the faculty homes moved from campus were in my estimation "historic" but others are welcome to come up with their own definition. Even as home were being relocated from campus other homes were being constructed by builders in a manner called "in fill" today. One of the prominent builders in the area was Marion Pugh, an Aggie football legend.

Neighborhoods east of the campus are now calling themselves "historic." In the early 1950s there were few streets and houses in that area east of the campus. All houses east of the campus are johnny-come-latelies wishing to hitch a ride on the college faculty homes history.

So the selling point is location, and not necessarily history.

Interesting, fossil.

There is another house for sale in that area around the corner from the 316 Pershing house (on Park Place, perhaps?). On a recent walk, I stopped to look at the flyer, and it said that the house was built in 1915 or so and had been moved from the A&M campus. I wondered what that was about. Thanks for filling in the details! (That house was priced at $650,000--it is a beautiful home).

I have lived in that neighborhood since 1973. Our home was built in 1936. When we moved in we were the youngest people in the area, and the neighborhood was in transition. Many of the original owners were retiring and moving away or were dying. The area had great proximity to the university, the houses were all different, and they generally had fairly good sized lots. Ours is 165x150. In the following years many new people moved into the area and did renovations to the existing houses, some of the renovations were major, completely redoing a smaller house into a much larger version. In the last number of years we have seen people demolishing older homes that were not worth preserving and building much larger homes on the lots. The price of lots on Lee has gone up greatly and I believe the last lots sold were in the 300,000 plus range. We have always loved this area and would recommend it to anyone.

What constitutes an "historic" house or building is open to interpretation. Historic in CS and Houston, for example, is only a matter of a few decades - but my euro friends just laugh when I tell them this.

What does the city say about how old a house has to be in order to qualify for the historic plaque that you see around the Southside area? I used to know this when I lived in that area (30 years or 50?). And just because a house is that old does not mean it is historic - there are some crap houses in town that are old enough to qualify but I would hesitate to consider them "historic" in the sense that we are talking about. The house I grew up in on Walton Drive is a good case in point, although there are several in the Eastside that I would consider to be historic for this area. The Cooper house on the corner of Walton and Francis is one, just becasue of the unique architecture (it has been for sale - has it sold yet?).

I am glad the city is finally doing a proper inventory of historic houses in CS. Having a sense of place of where we live, and the history of the development (like the great map and summary above) is very important, especially in our community where people come and go so frequently.

aggiegal ... You say built in 1915? That house new probably cost in the neighborhood of $3-4,000 and more than likely was from a "kit" purchased from a Sears Roebuck catalog and shipped in by rail. Many of the homes of that era came from Sears and the kits included all lumber, hardware, nails and cedar shingles. Indoor plumbing and electrical wiring were not included because the campus had just recently acquired a power plant and household water came from cisterns.

In the photo you may recognize the Systems Admin Building under construction at the time ... but no New Main Drive. That is because Highway 6 was not completed until 1936.

You can identify what would later become Joe Routt Boulevard on campus and find at the east end of it a black top square building ... that building was the A&M Consolidated schoolhouse at the time of the photo. And Joe Routt Boulevard was not named as such then because Joe had not yet achieved All-American fame on Kyle Field ... nor had Capt Joe Routt died a hero in the Battle of the Bulge in WWII.

[This message has been edited by fossil_ag (edited 6/11/2008 10:33a).]

I think there is a small house for sale at 208 Pershing. Don't know the asking price.

208 is listed at $350K.

In my hometown...historic homes dated to the late 1700s and earlier.

Homes from the 1900s through 1930s are not historic and were usualy just torn down and recycled.

The Southside Historic District is made up of old houses moved to their present location from the A&M campus, old houses built on site beginning in the middle 1930s, and others built after WWII to recently.

The older homes are historic only from the sense that some trace their origins to the unique happening of having been previously located on the A&M campus, and in great measure to the fame of their former occupants on campus. (Tracing a house's history to Doc Asbury's inhabitation would be a treasure ... or the Kyles, the Nagles, the Boltons or Waltons ... or even the house once located at the east end of Evans Library lived in by the Gibb Gilchrist family in the 1950s.) Other houses there are just old houses, some gussied up more than others, but certainly well short of historic.

Somewhere in the TAMU Archives there is an old musty ledger that shows the housing assignments of the faculty homes through the years and possibly the disposition when they were sold and relocated. That is the only source of the term "historic" related to Southside.

[This message has been edited by fossil_ag (edited 6/11/2008 3:01p).]

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Note in the lower part of the photo and east-west "thoroughfare" (gravel road) on the south boundary of the campus. That road would later become Jersey Street, and later still George Bush Drive

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And note that there is a railroad that intersects about a block south of Kyle Field. The one to the left is the old I&GN Railroad. The point of intersection was called the Spear Interchange. Many of you with GPS units might wonder why when you're crossing the George Bush/Wellborn intersection it reads as Spear, TX. Well that's why. Back in the day when the the railroads were being mapped, there were no points of interest to follow except these interchanges, so they were put on a map. Those maps were later incorporated into other maps and we now sometimes see these points as cities.

Here is a pretty recent picture of the area. When the I&GN Railroad left town, the old track was converted into a street. With recent connections of that street, you can see the direct path all the way to Wellborn (which also used to be Wellborn Interchange).

I'm sitting in a truly historic home right now. It was built in 1831 in Bloomfield, KY. I've been spending the afternoon trying to do some online research about the house and its previous owners. My inlaws just bought it.

I'm in the former kitchen/carriage house/slave quarters. The 1850 census shows that the owner had 5 slaves - 3 female and 2 male. They would have lived in the very rooms that I am in right now. My FIL uses this seperate building as an office. The kitchen was away from the house to prevent fires from burning down the house.

This place is amazing. I will never be able to consider houses in College Station as historic again. But they all have to start somewhere. In 1831, this place was a new build too.

Its amazing looking at that aerial shot how Marion Pugh could have been a straight shot all the way to south of town.

Angry Beaver-That picture and the info is pretty cool. I always wondered what the deal was with the I&GN road.

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So the selling point is location, and not necessarily history.

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Location certainly is an important factor driving value in Southside (as it does in College Heights), but it is the charm and feel of the neighborhood (it is as historical as you can get in College Station ) that drives the value, imo.

I am surprised that you do not know the difference between an historical area and an historical district.

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I am surprised that you do not know the difference between an historical area and an historical district.

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Or historical puffery?

Thanks as always for all the info, fossil.

Beaver, got any more pictures like that?

Fossil,

I am not joking. College Station does not have an historical district. Bryan does however.

I have seen listing agents advertise Southside homes as being in the "College Station Historical District." They are opening themselves up to lawsuits from buyers.

Southside was in my district when I was on patrol. I really loved that area and some of the people there still ask about my kids when I see the out and about. You know - I absolutely love College Station.

Sorry - the memorial service today put me in a sentimental and mushy mood.

There may be a technical difference between the terms "area" and "district" in real estate parlance but my greater concern is in the use of the broad term "historic" in relation to any structure not related directly to the a&M campus.

I arrived on this planet in 1933 and would argue vociferously if something or someone younger than me was advertised as historic.

[This message has been edited by fossil_ag (edited 6/11/2008 7:04p).]

As well you should, fossil. Most Americans (yes, OSA, even New Englanders) have a ridiculously abbreviated sense of history.

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I arrived on this planet in 1933 and would argue vociferously if something or someone younger than me was advertised as historic.

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I agree fossil. It should be called the "Southside Quaint District."

Fossil,
Are you from College Station?

I would love for fossil to host a gathering. I think I could sit for hours and listen to him talk about the history of our community.

Great idea, tliac! I don't know who Fossil is in real life (I'm guessing you do). My grandparents lived here off and on for many years--my grandfather taught and coached at Consol in the early 50s, and then they lived here in the summers when my dad was a kid while my grandfather was working on his PhD. My dad has great memories of the area from that time, but his memories are those of a little kid and aren't always accurate.

I moved here in 1995 for school, and always enjoyed the stories. Now that CS is my permanent home, I have even more appreciation. My grandfather died in 1997--I wish I had carefully listened to his stories.

I don't know who fossil is but I love the information that he provides about our community. Fossil - are you game??? I will organize it. You know how to find me.

His knowledge is impressive. It would be fun.

Fossil isn't nearly as impressive in person. JK, that would indeed be a lot of fun.