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Lea Residence
El Paso, Texas

 

Description: Lea residence
Other Names: Schaer house
Address: 1400 Nevada Avenue at Newman Street, El Paso, El Paso County, Texas
Type: domestic: home
Original Client: Mr. and Mrs. (the former Zola Mae Utt) Thomas (Tom) Calloway Lea, Sr.
Historic Inventory:
Date: 1915-1916
Condition: extant; in use as a home

Architect or Firm: Henry C. Trost
Associated Architect or Firm: Trost & Trost
Contractors:
Dimensions and Orientation: two stories; basement
Budget/Cost:

Foundation: stone
Wall Materials: probably brick; plastered
Roofing Materials: shingles; pitched roof with wide overhangs
Other Materials Used: red brick porch enclosure
Remodeling and Additions: pergola has been glassed in

Present Owner: privately owned
Location of Drawings: none known to exist
Location of Documentary Photographs: El Paso Public Library: Ponsford 173, perspective view from street corner

Bibliography: Harriot Howze Jones, Heritage Homes of El Paso: the Lea Home. Password, volume XXI, number 4 (Winter, 1976), pages 157-160 (photograph of exterior on page 160; see Remarks, below)

Remarks: The original address, 1316 Nevada Street (now Avenue), first appeared in the 1911 El Paso city directory.

Tom Lea was Mayor of El Paso from 1915 to 1917. The Leas were parents of Tom Lea, Jr., well known writer and artist, who painted a mural on the wall of the breakfast room.

Jones, in the Bibliography item listed above, provides a particularly lively account of the house and its occupants. The lower floor was designed in the Craftsman style with extensive use of exposed wood and built INS. The walls have creamy wide band of dark wood at the top of the walls and this extends, with the same width, along the ceiling. The living room is very large, the full width of the house.  At one end there is a fireplace with dark wood mantel and frame, there are cream color tile around the opening. Attached to the mantel is a bronze plaque, with raised letters reading : IN RECOGNITION OF ALMIGHTY GOO THIS HOME IS DEDICATED TO FATH, HOPE AND LOVE.  The dining room wall have the same plaster and wood treatment as the living room. There is a built-in buffet with glassed upper portion. A window seat extends below the three windows, and in this there was drawers for storage. Behind the dining room is the kitchen, and off of that is a small breakfast room.There was a den with a fireplace in the corner. Two walls are lined with bookshelves, one wall consists of double French doors, and the fourth wall consists entirely of glass cases with sliding glass doors. Here Mr. Lea kept his gun collection.

The upper floor consisted of three bedrooms, a dressing room, a sewing room and sleeping porch.

Prepared for the El Paso Public Library by Lloyd C. and June F. Engelbrecht under a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, 1990