Tuesday, November 23, 1999
One-time Texas palace on auction block
By Bill Whitaker
Early this century Chamber of Commerce officials routinely
referred to the Bacon estate at 1545 N. 5th as a Texas palace.
They talked as if it were a virtual tourist attraction, a local
version of the Taj Mahal or Buckingham Palace.
Of course, it really wasn’t.
Today the 84-year-old, 4,600-square-foot home is no longer
excitedly referred to as palatial, but it does indicate the sort
of grandeur Abilene’s moneyed, early-day businessmen enjoyed.
Among other things, it boasts four fireplaces, an oak stairway
leading to five large bedrooms, Italian milk-glass fixtures and
servants’ quarters out back.
Which is why its sudden appearance on the sale block has attracted
so much attention around town. The asking price is somewhere above
the $400,000 range.
Although the once-decrepit home has been painstakingly restored
the last 17 years, it has not been a home most of that time. Owners
John and Carmen Carter purchased it in 1984 but mostly used it
as an office for their oil business. Now that John is dead of
heart problems (and, sadly, at age 49), Carmen has put the house
up for sale.
Granted, doing so was tough, but the 42-year-old businesswoman
says she’s reorienting her life now that her husband and
partner is gone.
“For a while I just want to live on an island somewhere,
write and drink fancy rum drinks,” the former Arkansas newspaperwoman
said. “You know, you always see these movies where someone
has moved off to an island in the Pacific and is lying around
drinking rum drinks? Well, that’s for me.”
Meanwhile, the Bacon estate is beckoning for another owner.
Guest quarters
The hardest part for the onetime Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
reporter is that she hasn’t really had much of a chance to
live in the grand home till just recently. She’s become amused,
too, by some of the unique touches about the residence, such as
a “prayer room” as well as what she understands are
the guest quarters.
“I guess they didn’t want guests to stay long,”
she theorized of the first owners while walking me through the
place the other evening. “There’s no closet and they
scrimped on the flooring, but only in this one part of the house.
The floor here is pine, not oak.”
Such touches say plenty about the home’s first owner,
C.W. Bacon. An astute businessman and devout Christian, he helped
manage the success of the Wooten grocery empire throughout West
Texas, started one of the first two firms in all Texas to finance
the purchase of automobiles for ordinary folks and engaged in
some ranching near Ovalo.
By the time the Carters purchased the home, Bacon had been
dead 37 years and the palace he called a home had fallen into
disrepair. Carmen recalled that the Bacon estate’s decrepit
condition didn’t exactly reveal itself right off. For instance,
the old water pipes gave no indication they were paper-thin and
ready to burst.
“I had yard people working and had the water turned on
and suddenly the yard guy comes over to the office where I worked
and said there was a river under the house,” Carmen said.
“It just blew all the water pipes.”
Sometimes the couple felt they were living the plot of that
movie “The Money Pit.”
“One time we turned on the air conditioner and then were
gone for the weekend,” Carmen said. “And, you know,
the air conditioner has a drain thing and, well, the thing was
not exactly level and the ceiling we’d just had repaired
and plastered caved in.”
And then there were the ghostly footsteps from Mr. Bacon’s
bedroom. Of course, at least the new homeowners knew it couldn’t
be the old water pipes groaning anymore.
Stranger on the wall
In other ways, the house yielded up its charm quickly. For
instance, the pantry is wallpapered with old, easy-to-read editions
of the Abilene Daily Reporter. And the Carters took the home’s
intricate architectural blueprints, had them lavishly framed and
attractively displayed in the home’s inviting kitchen.
While the Carters definitely went a ways toward making the
place a home, they kept it mostly as an office, making their residence
elsewhere. Even so, Carmen added her own little touches here and
there, always keeping in mind that the place was, first and foremost,
a home and that they might well live there some day.
For instance, one day Carmen had a large portrait hung in one
room, just to evoke the warm, stately air that C.W. Bacon probably
enjoyed in his heyday. It was a painting purchased at a garage
sale, the soul pictured unknown. It likely shows an early-day
businessman. In any case, John routinely shook his head in frustration
about it.
“He’d always be saying, ‘Who is that man and
why is he hanging in our house? I don’t want him in this
house!’ I think it was somebody who’d lived in Brownwood
at one time. He looks like a banker to me. Anyway, it drove my
husband crazy — and isn’t that what wives are for?”
Maybe so, but the experience of getting the Bacon estate back
in order could’ve driven one crazy all by itself.
Bill Whitaker, who can proudly identify the pictures of
anyone hanging in his own house, can be reached at 676-6732 or
whitakerb@abinews.com.
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Copyright ©1999, Abilene Reporter-News / Texnews
/ E.W. Scripps. Publications
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