Villa Antigua™Lockwood Building Restoration Project

The Webb County Heritage Foundation recently completed the stabilization phase of the Villa Antigua™ restoration project intended to bring new life to one of Laredo’s oldest buildings located at 819 Zaragoza St. in downtown Laredo. Formerly known as
the Lockwood Building after a customs house brokerage located there, it is considered one of the few remaining structures reflective of our community’s early settlement.

Through a Texas Preservation Trust Fund Grant from the Texas Historical Commission and a matching grant from the Anonymous Angel Trust, this Villa Antigua™ project represents the Foundation’s dedication to preserving and protecting Laredo’s valuable historic architecture. The Lockwood building is a vernacular masonry building with simple Spanish Colonial details. It is typical in style and construction of the period following the end of hostilities with Native Americans in this area (ca. 1865), and before the railroad reached Laredo (1881). As a greater variety of materials (especially wood)
became available by the mid-1870s, traditional regional construction practices – as exemplified in this building – were largely displaced.

The building is among the last examples of these traditional structures in the area. With their chipichil roofs (a lime-aggregate slab) supported by vigas, generally narrow rooms, lack of windows in favor of pairs of doors, their architectural ancestors come from a union of Roman residential architecture (e.g., Pompeii), and indigenous, perhaps Mayan, construction methods. By 1870, these traditional buildings had wider rooms made possible by cheap,
dimensional lumber from east Texas and southern U.S. forests. Within a few years, the chipichil roofs and the labor-intensive masonry walls gave way to gabled wood roofs and, for
the most part, wood framed or brick structures.