WOODLAWN MANSION. Woodlawn is the largest of the four remaining two-story Greek Revival mansions built in the 1850s by Austin's master builder Abner H. Cook.^qv Designed for James B. Shaw,^qv Texas state comptroller, the house was finished in 1853, one year before Cook built the Governor's Mansion.^qv The house is made of local brick, probably from Cook's own kilns, and is distinguished by a fine east-facing front portico with two-story Ionic columns and a small balcony at the second story center hall. The floor plan of the main block, like the Governor's Mansion, has two large rooms facing each side of a wide center hall. The north side of Woodlawn, however, has an additional small ell-shaped porch with three two-story Doric columns. In the twentieth century the considerable acreage surrounding the house was developed into a neighborhood of elegant homes, and the mansion is now on a large, beautifully landscaped lot at 6 Niles Road. Almost as soon as the building was completed Shaw abandoned the idea of living there because of family tragedies. In 1856 Governor Elisha Marshall Pease^qv bought Woodlawn, and it remained in his family for many years. In 1957 Governor Allan Shivers^qv and his wife refurbished Woodlawn as their home and had the brick painted pale pink. In 1961 the Texas Historical Commission^qv erected a historical marker on the house. In 1994 the Shivers family still owned the house.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Dorothy Kendall Bracken and Maurine Whorton Redway, Early Texas Homes (Dallas: Southern Methodist University, 1956). Kenneth Hafertepe, Abner Cook: Master Builder on the Texas Frontier (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1992). Andree Abell Petticrew, Abner Cook, Master Builder (Waco: Texian Press, 1985). David Elmore Wark, Abner Hugh Cook: Master Builder and Citizen of Austin (M.A. thesis, University of Texas at Austin, 1981). Roxanne Williamson, Austin, Texas: An American Architectural History (San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 1973).

Roxanne Williamson