The Lamar Room

The one room that can stir the Rebel in all of us is the basement. If ever there is a space that clandestine meeting would have been held during the planning of the Texas Republic, this room could have been it had it been around during that era.

How did it become the Lamar Room???

Mirabeau Bonaparte Lamar,2nd President of the Republic of Texas, gives Johns Small a Land Grant (HEADRIGHT) of 1280 acres of land of Survey #183 section 3 on Oct 11, 1841, in reward for serving under the Republic of Texas.

Debbie Gracy, the current owner, purchased the property from Howard Calder, the great-great grandson of Mirabeau B. Lamar!

This room has been named in honor of the great men and women whose courage and spirit created a country called The Republic of Texas from 1836-1845.


What is so special about this room??

It has been a determined mission from the start to keep this space from becoming a storage room for mechanical equipment and has required a team effort to deal with code compliance issues and restoration issues. When faced with the code issue of being 6 inches short in height, the answer was..Lets just excavate 6 inches!

Firstly, the wall is inscribed with 1875; the beams are from very old cedar taken in the area. Based on the size of the exposed cedar beams, it is apparent that the Cedar Tree was alive and well in Texas prior to independence. There are many stories of how the cedar invaded our hill country and these cedar beams can shed some light on at least when they did not arrive in Texas! It is our hope that a dining experience in this Private space will not only spark a debate about the origin of the cedar tree but inspire people to be inquisitive of the history of the great State of Texas.

We hired the services of a designer to help create an authentic feel of what this space could of looked like during this era.

Proposal from the Designer (July 15, 2008)
“The goal is to create an atmosphere of a clandestine Rebel meeting room in the 19th century Texas Root Cellar. As much as possible every aspect of the rustic nature of the space will be maintained and little if any post era items eliminated or very well concealed. Great attention must be given to everything incorporated into the design and must be contemporary to Mirabeau Lamar’s era.”