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Hendley Building

Galveston, TX

Built in stages between 1855 and 1858, The Hendley Building is the oldest commercial building on The Strand. The Greek Revival style features brickwork with the extraordinary one-sixteenth-type mortar joint made famous in Boston. The building has an elaborate cornice, with a brick range of small arches and projecting continuous brick corbels. Ground floor columns and lintels are of granite as well as the quoins at party walls that separate the four sections of the original building. Almost all of the construction materials used (including the brick, granite, cement and cast iron) came on sailing vessels from Boston.

The merchant house of Wm. Hendley & Co. was composed of Wm. Hendley, Joe Hendley and Capt. John Sleight (their initials are carved in granite blocks located high on the Strand facade of the building). The building was designed for use as a commercial block and was planned to have the ground floor high enough from the surface of the street for drays and wagons to back up to the sidewalk to take on their loads without any undue lifting of weights. The street was filled during the grade raising following the Great Storm of 1900.

The Hendley Building bears some signs of the Civil War Battle of Galveston. There is a good-sized hole in the cornice on the 20th Street facade caused by a cannonball from a Federal gunboat during the battle to recapture Galveston from the Federal sin 1863. Throughout the Civil War, an observatory was maintained on the roof at the corner of the building to monitor the movements of Federal gunboats that were blockading Galveston's harbor.

The building was acquired by the Galveston Historical Foundation in 1974. At that time the building was renovated to serve as headquarters for Galveston Historical Foundation as well as The Strand Visitors Center. In 1999 The Hendley Group renovated the building creating eight unique loft apartments on the 2nd and 3rd floors of the building.