Seward Plantation

Seward Plantation is a 60-acre farmstead east of Independence in Washington County, Texas, laid out around 1855 by John H. Seward. Its centerpiece is a vernacular Greek Revival house of native red cedar on a shale foundation, with a double gallery across the south front. Family tradition says the house began as one story and was rolled about three-quarters of a mile to its present site before 1860, where a second story and rear additions followed. Around it stand a stone smokehouse, a log duplex that served as slave quarters, a frame cabin and blacksmith shed, barns, and the swale of the old La Bahía Road, which once passed within 50 yards of the porch until the 1950s. The property has stayed with the Seward family and remains largely intact. It is listed as a district because it preserves the buildings, landscape and agricultural history of an antebellum Texas plantation, from cotton growing to later hay and cattle.