The neatly attractive appearance of the two-story frame house at 2417 Avenue M belies its complicated history. This building has moved more times - and certainly led more lives - than some people.
The home was originally built in 1874 as the first St. Angela’s Hall, a part of the Ursuline Convent and School. It was named for St. Angela Merici, founder of the first order of Ursulines in Italy.
The hall served as parlors and reception rooms, with dormitory space on the second floor, providing a quiet, orderly environment for those who lived and studied there.
Many original details remain, including the decorative fretwork above the distinctive portico and the double balcony in back, high ceilings, an ornate cast-iron front-door chain and latch, hardwood floors, a simple newel post, and pediment molding above doorways and large windows.
The original interior configuration had eight rooms and four bathrooms, and the building used oil for lighting.
Galveston Historical Foundation historian Jami Durham, who specializes in property research, delved into the building’s past in 2019 at the request of Sean McConnell, then an archivist at the Galveston Texas History Center at the Rosenberg Library.
A previous owner had told McConnell that the house dated to the 1860s and was connected to the Ursuline campus, a claim Durham set out to verify.
“The person who contacted Sean told him that a previous owner had told them it was an 1860s building associated with the Ursuline campus,” Durham explained.
To test that story, she turned to historic maps. “The Ursuline campus was on Outlot 41,” she said.
“On the 1865 Confederate defenses map in our archives, the entire lot is vacant - completely void of buildings. And on the bird’s-eye view map of Galveston in 1871, you can see the beginning of Ursuline, but there’s no two-story building on the property that would line up with this house.”
That earlier estimate of an 1860s origin is where the local lore of the home serving as a Civil War hospital began, but Durham’s research has proven the story incorrect.
A news item in the Galveston Daily News from September 1874 refers to the building as St. Angela’s day school, offering gratuitous instruction for children of limited means.
Over the years, St. Angela’s served as a storm shelter during the 1875 hurricane, a free school, and a place where the Ursuline Sisters offered religious education classes for Black women and children.
On October 30, 1882, a fire partially destroyed the building, and the present structure was constructed using its remnants. Its appearance, shown on the east side of the Ursuline Academy in a sketch advertisement for the 1888 city directory, is clearly recognizable as the house appears today.
The annual commencement of Ursuline Academy was held at St. Angela’s in June 1885. A newspaper account of the event relates that the hall was decorated with flowers, students performed a dramatic, costumed musical to entertain guests, and the nuns - “standing around in their black stoles and hoods” - smiled in approval.
A new parlor and music room were erected by Nicholas Clayton in 1891 on the site of St. Angela’s.
“So the house’s first move was prior to the 1891 construction of Ursuline Chapel, and it was moved to the west of the convent,” notes Durham.
With the newly constructed Clayton architecture, St. Angela’s was considered obsolete, and in April 1899 it was moved a second time to the corner of Avenue M and 25th Street, given an awning, and set up as a store space on the first floor with apartments on the second.
The new address alternated between 2427 Avenue M and 1302 25th Street, a reflection of how often the building’s identity shifted as it adapted to its changing surroundings.
In 1901, the building was used as Alderigi’s Grocery store, operated by a family of immigrants from Pisa, Italy. In addition to Ferdinando Alderigi, the house had two boarders upstairs: a carpenter named James Modrell, and a widowed dressmaker, Anita “Annie” Peters Haines, whose son William shared her rooms.
Haines married Silvio, a member of the Alderigi family, in 1904. After their marriage, the couple, her son William, and Rafael Arighi - a cook at the Pickwick Restaurant - all shared the rooms above the store.
Within two years, the household had completely turned over. Brothers Alexander, Edward, and Vincent Licata took over the grocery store in 1906. They learned the business from their Italian immigrant father, Sam, who operated his own store on Avenue M ½.
Licata Brothers offered groceries, fruits, vegetables, fish, and wild game. Edward lived upstairs with his wife Bernarda, their children, and Bernarda’s brother Peter Oddo, a trackman with the Galveston Electric Company.
The brothers moved their business to a nearby storefront in 1908, marking yet another shift in the building’s long and varied commercial life.
When the operation changed hands, it became Carbell and Manusos, operated by Greek immigrants Robert Carbell and George Manusos.
Upstairs, South Carolinian Mary Ann “Molly” Brighton, widow of wheelwright Charles Brighton, ran a rooming house, and the bachelor grocers were two of her tenants.
In 1909, the store was renamed Carbell Brothers, operated by brothers Robert and Andrew Carbell. Neither brother lived upstairs, but Brighton continued to run the boarding house with two additional tenants.
Robert Guin took over the grocery in 1911 and moved into Brighton’s establishment, which by then had grown into a bustling residence. Its boarders included an iron worker, a Singer Sewing Machine salesman, two machinists, a boatman, a fisherman, a carpenter, and a Spanish interpreter.
By present-day standards, that was a crowded house, but for single working men of the era, shared rooms were both economical and entirely typical.
In 1913, Brighton moved into her own home on Sealy, and the house was quickly filled with new faces. Delmar L. Rainey and his wife, Emily, took over the store and lived upstairs with their young daughter.
They shared both the house and the business with Emily’s brother, Walter H. Moseley. The venture was short-lived, and all three moved away the following year.
A 27-year-old Italian immigrant, Gaspare “Jasper” Trippodo, and his wife Palma were the next to move into the house. They operated a grocery store on the first floor and lived upstairs with their daughter, Rose Marie, for two years.
The succession of Italians connected with the property should come as no surprise. Its owner, Philip Liberto, was an active member of the local Italian Benevolent Society and the Catholic church.
He immigrated to Galveston from Palermo in 1884 and found success on the island. In addition to owning rental properties, he operated his own grocery store nearby for more than 35 years while he and his wife raised their 11 children.
In 1916, a new sign appeared on the corner store: “J. D. (Joseph) Campbell Fancy and Staple Groceries.” The new proprietor soon advertised a space for rent - presumably part of the grocery - that was “suitable for a butcher shop.”
Adding a butcher made it possible to offer fresh poultry to the neighborhood, and Campbell’s store became the last grocery to operate in the building, bringing an end to a long and lively commercial tradition.
Liberto’s daughter Lillian, known as “Lillie” to family and friends, was the first member of the Liberto family to actually live in the house. She and her husband, Lancing “Lance” Detroit Dorton, a fireman, moved into an upstairs apartment in 1919 along with her four sons from a previous marriage.
Lillie worked as a saleslady for Peter Gengler, one of Galveston’s most successful grocers. Her son, Michael Sgitcovch, was a chauffeur for Gregory Transfer, the carriage and omnibus service next door to the Tremont Hotel.
Two of Lillie’s siblings, Sarah and John, also lived in the house. The other upstairs apartment was occupied by Walter Scott Knapp, his wife Ida, their son Elmo, and their daughter Rose, born that October.
Knapp and his partner, Frank Long, opened the Galveston Broom Company on the first floor, home of the Blue Label Broom, whose reputation for quality quickly grew.
With the quarters becoming quite full, the Dorton family moved to their own home the next year, just in time for the birth of a fifth son.
By 1921, Liberto and his wife were ready to have a home separate from their business interests. In December, he filed for a permit to build a residence at 1302 25th Street and moved the existing structure to 2417 Avenue M, where it stands today.
It was the third time the two-story building had been relocated, adding yet another chapter to its already remarkable journey.
Most of the area now known as the Silk Stocking District was once occupied by the immense Texas Cotton Press. When the factory went bankrupt, its building was demolished, and the land was subdivided into lots sold at auction in 1898.
According to real estate agent Mari Berend, who is currently representing the sale of the home at 2417 Avenue M, the concrete wall at the back of the yard is part of the original factory walls. It’s possibly the only surviving remnant of the once-impressive operation and a rare physical link to the industrial past of the neighborhood.
No occupants appeared in the city directory at the 2417 Avenue M address from 1923 to 1930.
During the 1930s through the 1970s, a steady parade of tenants lived in the home, including an engineer, an ice-delivery truck driver, a fireman at the Galveston Wharves, cooks for Hill’s Café and the Original Mexican Café, a teacher, an employee of Lone Star Distributing, and even a clerk from the Interurban Queen, the popular shop along the city railway.
Some residents arrived with young families, while many were single men working in the city’s service and industrial trades. The mix reflected the neighborhood’s character at the time - practical, transient, and shaped by Galveston’s busy commercial life.
Six years after Philip Liberto’s death, his daughter Lillie sold the property to Blanche Thompson in 1944. The home was listed for sale again in 1945 for $5,000 and described as a “splendid post-war investment” as a duplex, with each unit including four rooms, a bath, and a garage space.
That price was typical for a home of its type at the time, but it offered a solid opportunity as an income property - especially for young families restarting their lives after World War II.
Arnoldo Agrella and his wife, Romualda Romita - immigrants from Portugal and Mexico, respectively - rented the house from 1947 to 1960, becoming some of its longest-term tenants. For thirteen years, they lived there with their children, and eventually their children’s spouses and grandchildren.
Most of the Agrella family worked in the food industry as cooks and waitstaff at well-known Galveston restaurants, including The Original Mexican Café, Hill’s Café, and Crow’s Drive-In.
After the Agrella family moved out, the home went quiet. It sat vacant for two years before Frank and Dolores Hernandez became the next tenants, living there for about a decade.
In the years that followed, 2417 Avenue M passed through several owners, including Clyde and Laura Yokoi, partners in La King’s Confectionery.
The current owners, Roland and Angela Jackson, who have cared for the house for a dozen years, have worked diligently to restore it over time, bringing portions of the floorplan closer to its original design.
Now listed for sale, they hope the next guardians of the property will be as enchanted with its history as they have been - that the kitchen will once again fill with the aroma of family meals, and that the story of this resilient, much-traveled house will continue as part of the fabric of Galveston.