Explore the 1892 Bishop's Palace in Galveston, Texas | Visit Galveston

Hi, I'm Denise Alexander, Chief of Museums for the Galveston Historical Foundation, and today we're going to give you a quick tour of the 1892 Bishop's Palace. So as we say in our audio tour that comes with part of your admission to the house is that when guests would have come to the house, this would have been what would have greeted them, this grand entryway, the staircase, and often they would have left their calling cards, which was very big in the Victorian era, and this little calling card basket, which is original to the house. So as we walk through, this is Colonel Gresham's library, and so the house was built for Walter and Josephine Gresham. It was completed over a five year span, ending in 1892. They annually held a New Year's Day celebration in the house, and we usually do, but unfortunately this year we weren't able to do it, but the walls in here we get a lot of questions about. These were actually not painted by the Gresham family, but by Sister Mary Agnes after the Catholic Church built the house. So at the Bishop's Palace, everything that you see either has a relation to the Catholic Church or to the Gresham family. So the two chairs in this room were both Colonel Gresham's chairs, and we have photographs showing those originally. The vase or ewer, water ewer, what it actually is above the mantelpiece, was brought back from one of the many Gresham travels. Like many families during the Victorian times, the Gresham family traveled extensively, and just like we do now, they brought back souvenirs. This was one of their souvenirs from a trip to Germany, which is probably a little bit grander than the souvenirs we are used to bringing back, but it's still a pretty cool piece. We get a lot of questions about, do you all just leave that up there? And we're like, yes, it's been there since around 1900, and so we're just going to keep leaving it there. The next room we're going to go into is the dining room, and for a lot of people, this is their favorite room in the house. The dining room table is from Bishop Byrne, the Catholic bishop who lived here, and the light fixture is also from the Catholic Church era. So this room has wonderful details, and so every time I come in here, I see something different. There are many, many little faces carved into the wood, so if you come to visit, make sure you take a chance to look those up. A lot of people, it's so dark in here, they don't always see the fun little faces, but I think they're really cool and nice, a nice detail in this room. Another question we get about this room is, what is this gold stuff at the top? And people actually say, what is this gold stuff at the top? It's actually called lincrusta, and so you can google lincrusta if you would like, but what it was, it was a new fad at the time, and it was made to imitate stamped leather. So this is a pattern that is warmed and stamped into almost like a plastic material, and they used this on the ceilings to make it seem like something fancier, not that this house needs to seem fancier, but it was just something that they did at the time. And we're walking through the rotunda here at Bishop's Palace, and one thing you might notice as we're in this room is the fireplace. Bishop's Palace has 13 fireplaces, and one of the things about this one that we get questions about is, you notice that there is no flue to it, and so these were all gas. They all still work a little bit. We don't turn them on that much anymore, but it is part of the part of the house tour, and as we kind of pan up, you'll see this five-point star and garland. Those were all hand-carved, and so we'll talk a little bit about the architect Nicholas Clayton and all of his wonderful woodworkers that we, he had at Bishop's Palace. So Nicholas Clayton was the architect of the house. He was an Irish immigrant, and fans of Galveston architecture will know that Nicholas Clayton designed many of the prominent buildings, churches in Galveston. Many of our downtown buildings are Nicholas Clayton. He was known for wearing a bow tie and taking a swim in the Gulf. He was trained through Memphis, originally from Ohio after they settled from Ireland. He worked on this house for many, many years. The daybooks are located at the Rosenberg Library. We were able to have copies of those. We have many of the original drawings of the house, and many consider this his most grand building throughout the state of Texas, which he did do designs in Austin, a couple courthouses, Dallas, kind of all over, but he was primarily known as a Galveston architect. So this house did, as I mentioned earlier, did take five years to build. It was definitely a labor of love. The Gresham family at that time had five children, so it'd be like, oh my gosh, I've got to find a place to put all these kids. They lived in a small house on Seeley Street during the construction, and just watched the house literally being built. There were a lot of changes being made to the house. A lot of these wonderful materials, the marbles that you see on the fireplaces, were all brought in by train. Mr. Gresham, the original builder of the house, was on the board of what is now the Gulf Colorado Santa Fe Railroad, so he was able to get in really wonderful pieces of marble, wood from all over. But for fans of Texas, you'll be glad to know that the house is basically built of East Texas pine, incredibly sturdy, which is kind of fun. This room is made out of satin wood, which kind of gives it its beautiful kind of burl finish. It seems pretty delicate. This is the music room. This is where, during the times of them having parties and gatherings, that they would come and listen to music often. And this is the parlor, another place that they would just have gatherings. These rooms were not used much by the family. The box over in the corner is called the postcard box. They, like I mentioned, they traveled extensively. It was a thing of the time to send postcards, receive postcards, and so they would put them in this box. It's also original. The wallpaper in both this room and the room prior to this, the music room, were recently replaced. This is Scala Lingerie fabric from Italy, the closest that we could find to what the original fabric looked like. And the pieces on the floor, the screen, are both original to the Gresham family. And this is part of a collection that J.H.F. received from the family about four years ago. We drove to Oregon and picked this up. That's where the family ended up, and they donated these pieces back to us. These screens were to mimic some of the children of the Gresham family. I mentioned they had five kids, and so it's pretty interesting detail on that. This was painted by a painter named Young, I believe is his last name, from New York that Mrs. Gresham hired. We've also been to his archives and gotten some more information about him. One of the newest pieces of Bishop's Palace to be restored is the conservatory. The exterior elements were restored over a nine-month period with a grant from the Texas Historical Commission and some lovely private donors. It's a wonderful building that was always original house. That's a question that we get, has it always been there? Yes, it's always been here, and actually it's through this window right here. It pops open. It's a little bit hard to get open. We probably won't be opening it up for tours to go out there, but you can see how you actually would get in from the inside. Mrs. Gresham loved to grow plants and ferns, and this was one of her prized places to be was the growing of ferns through this conservatory, and it's one of the reasons that we chose to use it for rehabilitation. So the next area we're going to go into is more the servant's area of the house. This is the butler's pantry for the china plates, dishes, pie safe, all are in this room, and some of the china that we have is original to the house and to the Bishop Byrne area of living here. Mrs. Gresham went to Washington D.C. to the National Gallery to learn how to paint china, and we're really lucky to have some of those. We have a cookbook from 1900, the Charity Ball cookbook that many many ladies in Galveston participated in, and there were a lot of oyster recipes in that. It's a Gulf Coast favorite, and we're very fortunate to have some of her oyster dishes. I think that's a really, really neat and beautiful item that we have are the oyster dishes. So the next spot we're going to go into, which is not as grand as people's houses these days, is the kitchen. So this really has a more utilitarian function in the house. The actual kitchen was in the basement, and the food was brought up through the dumbwaiter out here in the hallway and brought here to just be warmed and served. The family did hire a cook by the day. They did not have any live-in servants at the time. This was the 1890s, so they had drivers that brought in carriages for them. They had cooks that came in. They did have a nanny when the children were younger, but mostly the servants were brought in daily to do cooking and cleaning. And you can see back here in the servants area that a lot of times when people come to the house, they'll comment about all the different woods. There are seven different kinds of woods in the house. And back here we have long-growth pine, and you can see the beautiful burls, the curls showing the age of the wood. Now this is incredibly expensive, but this is what they used in the servants area of the house, because at that time it wasn't crazy expensive. We do have some fun kind of whimsical elements in the house. This is the annunciator box, which is the call box system. So if you were living at this time, you would use this to ring your servants because we're in the servants area. And this small room is our coat closet, and we also have a Pullman sink. Another fun fact of history is George Pullman, who was not a really super loved and revered man in the Chicago area, but he did make beautiful train cars, luxurious train cars that transported presidents. And so this is kind of a, I would say, a nod to Mr. Gresham being in the railroad. This is a Pullman sink and you can move it up and it closes to give you more space. And then this would have been what would have been used in a train car. All right, so here we are at the top of the staircase at Bishop's Palace. This is the informal sitting room, which this doesn't seem very informal when you look at it, but it actually is informal for the Gresham family. This is the room, this area, where they would spend a lot of their time in the summer. They would be able to catch the sea breeze. So one of the things that Nicholas Clayton did in the house is that he, all the rooms, the bedrooms, the way the house is laid out is to catch the gulf breeze. We face south, so when you open up the windows, usually about any time of the year, you're able to get a breeze through here. So that's one of the, another one of the ingenious things that Clayton did as he designed this house. So the next room we're going to go into is going to be a little bit dark, but it is the chapel. So I alluded to earlier some information about the Catholic Church. So after the Bishop's Palace was sold, at that time it was called the Gresham Home, Gresham House, the family sold the house after the deaths of Mr. and Mrs. Gresham in the late 1920s to the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church wanted a home for their bishop of the, at that time, the Galveston Archdiocese. We weren't then connected with Houston, and so they bought the house for a home for Bishop Byrne. And so, pretty grand house, and they made some modifications to the house. They replaced some of the roof structures. They turned what was daughter Josephine's bedroom into this chapel. The stained glass windows were part of a restoration project we did about five years ago, and these were all restored with hurricane glass on the outside. They're actually the most valuable in the house. They're made from a very famous glass manufacturer in Germany, and they're etched stained glass. When the sun comes through, they're really extraordinarily beautiful. We were lucky also to get a grant to help with the restoration of that. So the Catholic Church owned the property until it was sold to the Galveston Historical Foundation in 2012, I believe, and the house was used as a house museum starting in the 1960s. So the Catholic Church saw the value, knew that they didn't need to operate a house museum, and so this is what it's been used as since the 1960s, and of course is how we how we use it today. So the pieces in here all belonged to the Catholic Church. They put these in, the kneelers, the stained glass, the ecclesiastical paintings, and this is actually one room that we know needs a little bit of work. We have a big roof project that we need to accomplish here at the house, and until that gets done, some of these pieces that you see will just have to kind of stay the way they are until then. So we're going to walk through the summer sitting area into Mr. Gresham's bedroom. So yes, the walls are pink and blue. A paint analysis was done. These are the original colors that were put back in here, and again any of the furniture that you see is original to the family. Another piece above the mantle that we were able to get from the family is this wonderful pillowcase, and we had it framed to hang above here. It's really beautiful and kind of fun, and if you get into looking at the details here, all of the mantles match the wall color. So after we started putting the walls back to their original colors, everything started to make sense at the house. The walls are blue. The fireplace is blue. If the walls are a golden color, the fireplace tiles are a golden color, and it was not unusual for Mr. and Mrs. to sleep in separate rooms, another thing that was fairly common in the Victorian era, and as you look at these pan shots, you can see how this room would have gotten the most wind from the Gulf. Victorians also had a little bit different bathing habits than we do today. I'm sure as you've watched this tour, like where are the bathrooms? They had wash basins, so each of the bedrooms has a wash basin. These, all of the sinks, the winged lions out front, the bathtub that you will see, the one bathtub that you will see in a minute, were all purchased out of a catalog called J.L. Mott from New York. Catalog shopping was all the rage, and you could have gotten about anything that you wanted from a catalog, including bathroom sinks, tubs, not much different than a builder's catalog today. This is Mrs. Gresham's bedroom, some original paintings, a painting of her, and you can see how the stained glass in the room matches the pink walls. The fireplace has a pink hue, it matches the pink walls. They were really into matchy-matchy things, and again you can see how Mrs. Gresham's room would have received this really wonderful gulf breeze. And here it is, the one major bathroom in the house. This is mint and tile from London, but the sink was bought from J.L. Mott, the bathtub, the sink. The story that we all have always been told about Bishop's Palace is that, which was also common through research, is that we have three spigots, and it's kind of a trivia question, why are there three spigots on this? And this is one for hot, one for cold, and one for rainwater. The house does have cisterns, two cisterns in it, and so rainwater would have been collected, and it was said to be used for washing ladies' hair. We have one more big bedroom to show you, and this was the bedroom that was used by Bishop Byrne. When he moved into the house, this room was considered a little more private. Again, you can see it has windows that are gulf-facing. He would have had his own private balcony here, and he did retrofit the bathroom that's over here to the right. For a more modern standard, 1930s standard, it does have a shower and a toilet in it. It's the only shower in the house, and so would have made that a little bit more comfortable for him. And the bed is also a piece that we brought back from Oregon from the family. We have a couple more rooms to show you that is our standard tour when you come to Bishop's Palace. This back bedroom is what we kind of consider now the museum room. It has some exhibits in it that we change periodically. This would have been what we call the nanny's room. We have a 1900 Storm exhibit up here now. It's a little bit smaller than the rest of the rooms of the house. It's kind of backward facing. It wouldn't have had a great breeze to it. So this back bedroom also has direct access to the second floor of the house, to the third, excuse me, the third floor of the house, which would have been the room that the boys would have slept in. So yes, they did separate the boys and the girls. The girls had bedrooms downstairs, and the boys lived on the third floor. This small room here is the trunk room. This would have been where the family's clothes would have been brought down on the dumbwaiter and stored for use. A smaller room, like a modern-day closet, they had them too. Another thing that oftentimes people talk about in Victorians is that they didn't have closet because of some weird closet tax. It is not because of tax. It's because of furniture reasons, and wealthy families would have kept their furniture on a different floor of the house and had them brought down seasonally. This is another small bedroom bathroom. This would have been the bathroom the boys would have used from upstairs. This room is directly by the to the third floor. Our third floor attic space is on tour, but that is a special tour that we give guided on Saturday mornings, and those tickets are available on our website at galvestonhistory.org.