In his book Texas Homes of the 19th Century (1966), Drury Blakeley Alexander proclaimed this double-porticoed residence as “the finest example of Greek Revival architecture in Jefferson.” The house’s second and most notable owner was lawyer and jurist James Harrison Rogers, who moved to Jefferson in 1851 and purchased the house from Charles Peel in 1856. Hundreds of Greek Revival houses built in Jefferson prior to the Civil War closely followed the architecture of the Rogers House: a symmetrical composition with simple massing, a center-hall plan expressed by a projecting portico, an elevated foundation, and exceptional classical detailing. The corner site location gives the house two facades, each of different width, and a projecting tetrastyle portico marked by different column treatments. In 1903, the house was purchased by the Cumberland Presbyterian Church and used as a manse for fifty years. The “Old Presbyterian Manse,” as it is popularly known today, is currently owned and maintained by the Jessie Allen Wise Garden Club.
The Epperson-McNutt House (c. 1872) located across from the Rogers House at 409 S. Alley Street illustrates the stylistic transition between Greek Revival and late-nineteenth-century Italianate. The two-story house, built by lawyer and Texas legislator Benjamin Epperson, has a symmetrical facade, a center-hall plan with a one-story columned porch, and a classically detailed cornice, combined with slender Italianate round-headed windows, two-story bay windows, and a belvedere perched on the hipped roof that provides ventilation and light to a circular rotunda that is open to the first floor.