06/03/2026
Our Better Homes & Gardens new listing is a multilayered masterpiece symphony that reverberates, flows, transcends and converges into a Mahler-like adagio:
https://christophmason.garygreene.com/property/67-2412262-4019-inverness-drive-houston-TX-77019
“The City of Houston Protected Landmark residence at 4019 Inverness, “LEGEND,” the Mrs. Knox B. Howe
House, is a metaphor for a Houston that has mostly vanished.
Completed at the end of the Eisenhower
administration in 1959, its intertwined architectural and ancestral provenance begins much earlier in the first
quarter of the 20th century in Houston and travels backwards in time to the heady days of the Republic of
Texas.
LEGEND was designed for the Howe-Briscoe family by Birdsall Parmenas Briscoe, FAIA. LEGEND’s original owner, Dorothy Virginia Trone Howe, later Mrs. Edmund McAshan Dupree, was the widow of Knox Briscoe Howe, Briscoe’s cousin who shared his Briscoe-Harris lineage. The architectural historian Stephen Fox
wrote in the City of Houston Landmark Designation Report that “[the home] possesses character, interest, and
value as a visible reminder of the development, heritage, and cultural legacy of mid-twentieth-century Houston.
It was designed and built as a private monument to the distinguished Texan family heritage of [Knox Howe]…”
Dorothy descended from a ranching family in Fort Bend County famous for raising champion Santa Gertrudis
cattle and fine horses.
After a Houston childhood, she graduated from MacMurrey College for Women in
Jacksonville, Illinois in 1932 where she was a member of Belles Lettres, reputedly the first women’s college
literary society in the United States. Dorothy wrote the society column for the Houston Post until her marriage
to Knox Howe in 1941. A horsewoman of note who bred champion Saddlebred horses, Dorothy and her horse
Blue Beau Starr won the Houston Pin Oak Charity Horseshow Ladies Fine Harness Division championship for three consecutive years and in 1988 won reserve world’s championship (second place) in the World’s Championship Horse Show Ladies and Amateur Fine Harness Division in Louisville, Kentucky.
Dorothy’s commitments included the Houston Symphony, The Alliance of Pan American Roundtables, Houston Museum of Natural Science, Houston Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, Texas and Southwest Cattle Raisers Association, Friends of Mount Vernon, Fort Bend Museum, Museum of Fine Arts
Houston, Friends of the Houston Public Library, and the First Presbyterian Church of Houston.”
