Houston Post Building

15 July 1913: The newspaper which became The Houston Post was founded in 1880, and underwent several name changes and shifts of ownership before this building was erected in 1904. The entire publishing enterprise was housed in this small building. Presses and paper storage were on the basement level, and the 1st floor housed business offices. More offices and a mail room were on the 2nd level while the 3rd floor was for editorial offices and the 4th level was the composing room. Although it is hard to see on this printing of the card, the numerals on face of the clock are replaced with “The Daily Post,” the name of the newspaper in use at the time the card was printed. This building was headquarters for the post until 1924 when control of the paper came under the direction of Ross S. Sterling, Chairman of the Board and William P. Hobby, president. In 1926 the new Post Dispatch Building at 1100 Texas at Fannin was used for some administration functions (advertising) while printing of the paper was done at 2318 Polk at Dowling [now Emancipation Avenue in EADO (East of DownTown]. After the Post evacuated the building, it became a series of enterprises: Archer-Stewart Hardware Co.; The Dollar Store; Shotwell’s clothing store annex; Phoenix Furniture Company, Westheimer Furniture Company.

24 March 2019: Designed by I. M. Pie and finished in 1982, the 75 story JPMorgan Chase Tower is the tallest building in Houston. This façade at the southwest corner of Texas at Travis is the backside of the glacial gray tower which fills the entire block where the Houston Post once stood. The only splash of color on the block sits on the opposite corner at the main entrance of the building where a colorful five-story statue brightens the otherwise dismal plaza. Titled simply “Miro” for its creator, it is often referred to with a misnomer, “Personage with birds,” but it seems more likely that it is a surrealist representation of a male artist with protuberant penis holding aloft three palettes of the primary colors.  

Postmarked: 15 July 1913; Houston, Texas 
Stamp: 1c Green George Washington #405 

To: Mrs E. C. Stewart, 
7181 Upland, Street., 
Pittsburgh. Penn’a Homewood. Station 

​Message: Houston Texas. 7-15-13 
Dear Friend:: Maybe you will be surprised to receive this from me. but I am the young Lady that you were talking to over at the Homewood Station one Saturday. would be pleased to hear from you. My address is. Irma Salyers c/o Mrs D. J. Coulter. Houston Texas “General Del.” 

   This message from a casual acquaintance must have taken Mrs. Stewart a bit by surprise. If she remembered the recent encounter at Homewood Station she would have recalled a young woman barely out of her teens. She might have noted a Kentucky accent since Irma was born in Louisa, Lawrence County, KY, a small town 300 miles and worlds away from Pittsburgh. Mrs. Stewart was Georgia, wife of Earl Campbell Stewart, who lived about half a mile up Homewood Street from the rail transit station. Very little is known about Georgia, she seems to have dropped from the records before E. C. Stewart married his 2nd wife Bertha Hartman in 1926. 
   Irma lived far from Homewood Station, about 11 miles on the other side of the city at 501 Lorenze with her father, Charles H. Salyers, mother Jennie Murray, and sister Caroline Alice. Carrie married Herbert McCall and had a son Richard in 1916. Carrie’s second husband was Francis Moore, and by 1930 they brought her divorced mother Jennie into the blended home. 
   Soon after the chance meeting with Mrs. Stewart at the station, Irma traveled south, perhaps to investigate work possibilities in Houston. She gives an address c/o General Delivery at a boarding house run by Mrs. D. J. Coulter. Irma did not stay long in Texas, and by 1915 she was back in Pittsburgh where she married George D. Little on 16 October 1915. In 1910 Pittsburg had a population of half a million people, and was the regional powerhouse between the east coast and growing economic centers of the heartland. Houston was less than 80,000 at this same time, one-sixth the size of Pittsburgh, but definitely a city on the rise. 
   Earl was tall and slender with blue eyes and red hair, he and Georgia had no children. Earl’s second wife was Bertha Emma Hartman, widow of William Henry Boden by whom she had two daughters: Gertrude born in 2 April 1907, and Marion Ruth, born 23 November 1909 just 3 months after her father died August 17, 1909 of diabetes. Bertha and her twin sister Bessie were the eldest of a family of 7 children, their parents were John Robb Hartman (1856-1915) and Margaret Jane Hall (1860-1928). Earl and Bertha continued to live in the Pittsburgh area, though they changed addresses a few times. Their daughter Marion Boden died 11 March 1939 at age 30 and her mother Bertha died 7 May 1948 when they lived in Pitcairn, PA east of the city. Bertha and Marion are buried in Irwin Union Cemetery, next to her husband Earl, who died twenty years later. 
   Irma’s husband George Dawson Little was born in 1886 in East Liverpool, OH in an area that was on the cusp of 3 states; Ohio, Pennsylvania and the north panhandle of West Virginia. They first lived in Pittsburgh at 812 Homewood just two blocks down from her mother at 627 Homewood. There in 1920 George worked as a railroad pipe fitter, a most important job for a steam railroad line. By 1930 his railroad work took him to Youngstown, OH where he remained. George and Irma had only a single child, Carolyn Iwilla Little, born in 1921 in Pittsburgh, PA. George Little died in 1946 and is buried in Riverview Cemetery in the town of his birth, East Liverpool, OH; Irma died 27 years later and is buried in Lake Park Cemetery, Youngstown, OH, as is her daughter, Iwilla C. Little Jones (1921-1996). Jennie Murray Salyers died in 1940 and is buried in Churchill, PA; Charles Salyers died in 1957 and is buried in Ironton, OH.