Putting it back together again...

For those of you who missed the amazing work of LV Crane and Rigging of LaVernia and the Fowler House Movers, here's the show speeded up a little.

 

Restoration Begins

 

The restoration of the porches has begun! Some of the lumber from the porches was rotten and damaged beyond repair. 

 

 

 

 

 

However,  we have been able to reuse and reinforce some of the materials from Jesse Tiner's original construction. 

 

Some of the joists and rafters have been reused. 

 

Some of the original ledger boards were able to be used again. 

 

We are hoping to reinstall the banister boards and some bits of the decorative edging from the original construction.

Here's a little glimpse of the restoration of the front porch.

 

Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!

 Thank you so much to all those who helped us to relocate the Tiner Hendrick House.

Wilson County Historical Society

Clay Maeckel

Keith Muschalek

Robin Muschalek

Robert Creech

Chris Taylor

Sutherland Springs Historical Museum

Tammy Tiner

Cassandrea Tiner Hager

Katherine Goldberg

Tambria Read

Lorry Tuttle

Fowler House Moving Company

Wilson County News 

5C Concrete

Trejo Framing

LV Crane and Rigging Company

Judge Hank Whitman

Commissioner Jeffrey Pierdolla

Wilson County Commissioner’s Court

Anthony Delgado

Kenneth Hafertepe

Preservation Texas

Evan Thompson

Jesús Najar

Chuck Duplant

Hood’s Texas Brigade Association Re-Activated

Estella Muschalek

Glenn Carroll

Richard McCaslin

Melinda Kilian

D. L. Grant

Ann Rhew

Frances Fehribach

Kate Ruckman

Ken Tiner

Andrea Roberts

Tiffany Rasbury Burlison

Raina Powell

Rita Hodde

Jennifer Johnson

Wayne Tiner

Roxanne Tiner 

Richard Hall

Sandi Bjerke

Samuel Hastings

Curtis Hunt Restorations, Inc.

Attoyac Energy Services, Inc.

Abel Burgos

Isaac Burgos 

Butch Roberson

John Ideus

Bobbie Head

Shawn Ferguson

Baldy's American Cafe

Watco Tanks Inc.

Roberta Pegues Tandy

Dr. David Woodcock 

several anonymous donors 

The house has been saved! 

The relocation phase is complete. The restoration phase is beginning. We have raised enough money to rebuild the porches and the chimneys. We almost have enough to fund putting a new roof on the house. There are other renovations projects awaiting us: restoring the 27 windows in the house, repairing and restoring the shutters, interior restorations, exterior restorations, painting the house inside and out, a bit of plumbing and electrical work. I'm sure there will be much more. If you would like to contribute to the restoration fund, you can do so through Zeffy on the right hand column of this page or through the Sutherland Springs Historical Museum. If you have skills -- woodworking, carpentry, painting, plumbing, electrical -- we would love to have your help. Please contact Melinda Creech 832-978-8501 or mjcreech@mac.com.

Again thank you, thank you, thank you! 

Bee-leaving

 

If you have been following "The Friends of the Tiner House" Facebook page, you may have learned that last week we had to have two colonies of bees removed from the little house before we could proceed with setting it on its new foundation. The bees had moved in after these late spring rains and the proliferation of flowers at the old site. Maybe those bees were the descendants of the bees that Mr. Tiner kept in 1900—126 years ago. You can read more about "Mr. Tiner's 'Bees' ness" in an earlier blog.

The procedure, accomplished by Abel and Isaac Burgos (supported at times by my husband, Robert)  

required moving ten boards from the exterior of the house, 

vacuuming up the bees, 

 

and removing the combs with brood and honey. 

They harvested 31 pounds of honey. 

And the bees are leaving the Tiner Hendrick House for their new home on the Burgos Ranch in Mineral, Texas, Bee County.

A friend of ours commented on the post with a pun. He's quite famous for puns.

"He doesn’t need to vacuum those bees up, he should just take a close look at them. That’s because seeing is 'bee leaving'!"

It's taken quite a bit of "believing" to imagine saving the Tiner Hendrick House. We imagined that this, on the cusp of demoliton,

 

which 141 years earlier looked like this 

  

and now looks like this 

could one day look like this.

Thanks to the generosity of the Wilson County Historical Society, Tiner and Hendrick family members, Robin and Keith Muschalek, members of the Maeckel family, other members of the community, and some of you, we have raised enough funds to disassemble the chimneys, porches, and roof, move the house, set it on a new foundation on its new site. Soon we will rebuild the porches, reassemble the roof, rebuild the chimneys, and replace the old roof.

We will need more help with the restoration of the house. We hope to engage community members and other interested parties in restoring the windows and doors, rebuilding and restoring the staircase, replacing or repairing external siding, cleaning the interior, painting, and any plumbing and electrical work that needs to be done.

If you have any expertise (woodworking, plumbing, electrical) or inclination and would be willing to donate your time to restoring the Tiner Hendrick House, please contact Melinda Creech, mjcreech@mac.com, 832-978-8501.

If you would like to make a donation, any size, you can do it through Zeffy on the right sidebar. 

Thanks for all your help. Seeing is believing and believing is seeing.

 

 

 

A Moving Experience

 

The Tiner Hendrick House peaking through the oak trees at the new site.

We did it!

On Friday, May 29, 2026, the Tiner House made its way from the field in front of the old oak tree at its old location to its new place to stand, on FM 539 near the Polley Mansion, Whitehall. It is appropriate that the house stands here, because Connie Findley Tiner was the grand daughter of Joseph Henry Polley and Mary Bailey Polley and spent some of her childhood in the house after her father was killed in the Civil War. 

 

The disassembled portions of the Tiner Hendrick House

The five pieces of the Tiner Hendrick House (Cabin, House, and three sections of the roof) were moved up from the sandy land around the oak tree to higher ground. 

 

 

 

Later that week the houses were moved across the field to 7th Street, awaiting their 3 miles trek to their new home on FM 539. 

The move began around 9:30am with the trucks making a rather sharp turn onto 7th Street, then around the corner down 11th Street in Old Town Sutherland Springs. 

 

The trucks were preceded by a pilot truck that measured the height of the overhead wires. As the trucks approached the turn to prepare to enter SH 87, the boom truck had to lift the lines to provide clearance for the house.

 

The trucks turned right on SH 87 and turned left on FM 539. Lines had to be lifted again at that intersection.

 

The trucks continued on FM 539 

 

across the Cibolo Creek.

 

Continuing down FM 539, the trucks carrying the houses made their turn into the Muschalek's property.

The two story house was placed on the site looking through a grove of oak trees across the road and the Cibolo valley.

 

with the little cabin situated beside it.

 

The three sections of the roof arrived a bit later.

 

Three generations of the Tiner family were there for the move.  

 

There's still a lot of work to do to make the reality 

become the dream, 

but the move was a monumental first step.

In the next few weeks the house will be leveled and placed on a foundation, the three parts of the roof will be reattached, the porches will be rebuilt, the chimneys will be reassembled, and the roof restored. Later, exterior and interior restorations will be made; windows, shutters, and doors will be replaced and restored; the house will be refreshed with a new coat of paint. Restoration will likely take at least a year. We have funds to cover the reconstruction, but will have to raise funds for the later restoration. If you would like to help restore the Tiner Hendrick House, make your contribution through Zeffy on this page or contact me.

Raising the Roof

 

Last week we raised the roof on the Tiner Hendrick House. Well, actually we didn't. The Fowler House Moving Company and the LV Crane and Rigging Company did. It was amazing and a little frightening to watch.

Because of the height of the house, it was necessary to remove the roof and a portion of the second floor in order to move it. We removed all the doors, door frames, windows, and window frames from the second floor so that they could be refurbished and reinstalled. Fowler House Moving Company built a structure inside the the roof to accommodate the cables from the crane. The top of the house had to be sawn off, and the roof was cut into three sections. It was reattached with "scabs" temporarily awaiting the crane. Holes were made in the roof for the cables from the crane, and the cables were attached to the structure inside. When everything was attached, the "scabs" were removed and the roof was lifted up one section at a time and placed on a trailer for the transit to the new site.

The whole process went off without a hitch. Well, the huge crane did get stuck in the sand right off the bat, but he decided he could operate from where he was. It was amazing to see the roof separating from the house, being lifted above the house and gently placed on a trailer. The two sides weighed 4,000 pounds each, and the center section weighed 3,800 pounds. 

Here are some images of the event.

 

 

 

 

 

The roof as it is now consists of the original wood shingles Jesse Tiner put on in 1887. His diary records that on November 12, 1886 he ordered 17,000 shingles from the San Antonio Lumber Company. 

 

 

 The wood shingles are nailed on to furring strips with square nails. 

 

The wooden shingles are covered with asphalt shingles. Those must have been put on when the Hendrick and Hodge family owned the house. A tin roof was later put on over the other two layers. 

In the next couple of week all five pieces, the cabin, the two-story house, and the three roof pieces will move to their new home site, next to the Polley Mansion. With the house on a firm foundation, the crane will revisit  and put the puzzle back together again.

 

The Move Begins!

 

Last week, The Fowler House Moving Company began to move equipment to the present site of the Tiner Hendrick House in Sutherland Springs and began the immense preparations of securing the house to be moved the 3 1/2 miles down the road to the place it will finally stand, just down from the Polley Mansion, Whitehall. It will stand behind a lovely copse of live oak trees, looking through the trees to the Cibolo Creek below. The older portion of the house will look across the field to the Polley Mansion, where Connie Tiner's grandmother and grandfather lived and where she spent many hours of her childhood and, as an adult, tended her grandmother, Mary Bailey Polley, during her last weeks of life.

It has taken a lot of work to get to this place, and it will take many more hours of work to get the Tiner Hendrick House restored to the way it looked when Jesse Tiner finished construction on the house in 1887. A lot has already happened.

•  We became aware that the present owner intended to destroy the house to build a more accommodating structure. The house had always been admired by locals and we began to research a way to save the house.
• The house was evaluated by Preservation Texas to determine its value and its ability to survive a move. Preservation Texas affirmed these things and in 2025 placed the house on the 2025 List of Most Endangered Places in Texas.
• We began to investigate a new location. At first we contemplated moving the house just a few blocks away to county property. The Wilson County Commissioner's Court granted that move. Eventually, a spot near the Polley Mansion became available, and it was decided that we would move forward with trying to locate the house near the Polley Mansion, where the two examples of architecture in the county could be viewed side by side—one, a stone house from the 1850s and the other, a wooden house from the 1880s, both connected by family and holding over one hundred years of the history of Wilson County.
• We created a committee composed of Tiner and Hendrick family members, local historians, members of the board of the Sutherland Springs Historical Museum, and the owners of the new site for the Tiner Hendrick House.
• We began to raise funds for the enterprise. Wilson County Historical Society gave $50,000. The Maeckel Family matched that gift. Other Tiner and Hendrick family members have given substantial gifts, and we received gifts from other community members and other interested historians. Recently we have additionally received some large gifts from the Tiner and Maeckel families. We thank you all so much.
• We solicited bids from five house movers and finally settled on Fowler's.
• We cleaned out the house. This was quite a messy job. It had accumulated a lot of debris over the years and had become the roost for vultures, raccoons, and who knows what else. Along the way, we discovered names of lumber companies and brick makers.
• We also became aware that the building of the house was minutely documented by Jesse Tiner in the 300 page diary that he wrote in 1886-1889. Other diaries have also come to light, revealing more glimpses into the history of the time. An excerpt from an 1882 Tiner diary revealed that he built the small house in 1882 and Mr. Tudyck, who had built the chimney in the two-story house had also built the chimney in the small house. Another 300 page diary from 1898-1899 revealed many other interesting stories about the Tiner's life in the community of Sutherland Springs. We were also loaned diaries from the Hendrick family recounting parts of their stories when they lived in Stockdale and in Ireland before they moved into the house. 
• Keith Muschalek lead out in the deconstruction necessary for the move, removing an add on wash room at the end of the small house. 
• We hired Curtis Hunt Restorations, a local company to remove the chimneys. Their work was amazing. They took down the stones one by one, numbered them, placed them on pallets, and transported them to the new site. All this work was documented on a digital map of the chimneys. We do not have the funds at this time to pay for the rebuilding of the chimneys. However, when those funds become available the chimneys will be reconstructed just like Mr. Tudyck did in 1882 and 1887.
• Trejo Framing Company deconstructed the porches on both houses, saving as much of the lumber as possible. We found lumber company names marked on the lumber and square nails in much of the construction, indicating that most of that construction on the porches was original to 1882 and 1887. Trejo Framing Company will reconstruct the porches after the move.
• Members of the committee have removed screen doors, doors, windows, stairs, rails, banisters, shutters, and hardware, carefully storing those items to be returned in the reconstruction.
•  Right now the house looks a little ravished, with gaping holes where the chimneys and breezeways were. The truncated house without its porches lacks the Southern hospitality that once welcomed visitors. The roof looks a little tattered and piecemeal. We discovered a layer of wood shingles, nailed with square nails, a layer of composite asphalt shingles added later, and a tin roof put on top of all of them even later. In spite of all the necessary degradation, the house feels amazingly solid and sturdy inside. Jesse Tiner built a good house.
• Hastings Construction has prepared the site to received the house. One more interesting fact is that the land on which the house will sit once belonged to John and Shirley Grammer, rather famous local historians. 
• The last two jobs left are to topple a small brick chimney on the east side of the house that supported two wood stoves and to remove all the doors and windows from the second floor. Because the house is two-stories and will not fit under the power lines, it is necessary for the movers to cut the house horizontally and move the two-story house in at least two pieces.
• Over the next weeks Fowler House Movers will prepare the house for the move, move the house, and settle it in its new place, binding its cuts back together. Eventually, the porches and chimneys will be rebuilt, and a new roof will cover it all. The Tiner Hendrick House will welcome the community back to tell her stories once again, old stories and new ones.