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Charlotte Matilda was born in North Carolina in 1830. Her father emigrated to Robertson’s Colony in Texas, where she was raised until marrying John Wesley Scott, a rancher. After her husband dies of yellow fever in 1867, Charlotte managed the ranch. By 1875, Charlotte had married Edward Sidbury, a contractor and owner of a lumber supply store. Charlotte sold her ranching interests and focused on her husband’s business. He died in 1881, but Charlotte continued to manage his lumberyards in Corpus Christi, Alice, San Diego and Laredo. This led her to become the first female to serve as director of Corpus Christi National Bank.
In the early 1890s, New Yorker Colonel Elihu E. Ropes came to Corpus Christi, promising to build a deep-water port. Based on the idea of a deep-water harbor being dredged, speculation on land in Corpus became rampant and construction boomed. Ropes didn’t have the financial backing to dredge a deep-water port and, by 1893, the ‘Ropes Boom’ went bust. Charlotte Sidbury was left with a stock of lumber that had been ordered, but never paid for. Being the enterprising businesswoman she was, she built two adjacent rental properties, on the bluff, with the leftover lumber.
Both rental properties were Queen Anne Victorians, with elaborate Eastlake detail and built in the Bluff Addition, off of North Broadway. Sidbury moved the house from the bluff to Irishtown in 1929, and it was moved to its current site in 1977 by the Nueces County Historical Commission. |
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