Adjoining the courthouse square at the south end of Refugio's small downtown is the town's most concentrated neighborhood of elite houses from the turn of the twentieth century, the period when the arrival of the St. Louis, Brownsville and Mexico Railway rescued Refugio from the torpor in which it had existed for most of the nineteenth century. This house was built by Josephine O'Brien and her husband, Oscar Mitchell. According to Refugio journalist and historian Katharine E. Henkel, the Mitchell's daughter, Madie Mitchell Simmons, transformed the house with a Colonial Revival remodeling in 1940, reusing such elements as the gallery balusters.