Historic Kerrville: The Story of Kerrville & Kerr County

Cox HISTORIC KERRVILLE 

HISTORIC KERRVILLE 

The Story of Kerrville & Kerr County 

by Mike Cox 

TEXAS 

HERITAGE 

SERIES

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HISTORIC KERRVILLE 

The Story of Kerrville & Kerr County 

by Mike Cox 

HPNbooks 

A division of Lammert Incorporated 

San Antonio, Texas

First Edition 

Copyright © 2016 HPNbooks 

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, without permission in writing 

from the publisher. All inquiries should be addressed to HPNbooks, 11535 Galm Road, Suite 101, San Antonio, Texas, 78254, (800) 749-9790, www.hpnbooks.com. 

ISBN: 978-1-944891-07-7 

Library of Congress Card Catalog Number: 2016936606 

Historic Kerrville: The Story of Kerrville & Kerr County 

author: Mike Cox 

contributing writer for “Sharing the Heritage”: Scott Williams 

HPNbooks 

president: Ron Lammert 

project manager: Joe Neely 

administration: Donna M. Mata 

Melissa G. Quinn 

book sales: Dee Steidle 

production: Colin Hart 

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Tony Quinn 

2 ✦ HISTORIC KERRVILLE

❖ Above: This 1940s postcard emphasized Kerrville’s local, state and federal infrastructure, including (clockwise) 

the State Highway 16 bridge across the Guadalupe River, the Veterans Administration Hospital, city hall and the post office. 

Left: The Bluebonnet Hotel on the banks of the Guadalupe River, Kerrville. 

PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR. 

CONTENTS 

4 FOREWORD 

5 THE HISTORY OF KERRVILLE & KERR COUNTY 

43 SHARING THE HERITAGE 

50 ABOUT THE AUTHOR 

Contents ✦ 3

FOREWORD 

The first time I saw Kerrville was in the summer of 1957, a year after its centennial celebration. 

I was with my late grandfather, L. A. Wilke, then editor of what is now Texas Parks and Wildlife 

Magazine, who took me with him when he visited the Kerr Wildlife Management Area to take some 

photos for an article he was writing. I still have a pre-historic flint point the management area’s 

superintendent gave me when I was a wide-eyed nine-year-old. 

The WMA acreage lies well outside of town, but we passed through on the way there and likely 

had lunch or supper at the Del Norte Motel restaurant on State Highway 27. If we didn’t eat there on 

that trip, in later years we often enjoyed a hamburger and slice of apple pie at the Del Norte when 

returning to Austin from hunts on the Y.O. Ranch. 

I took my first eight-point buck on the ranch, personally guided by owner Charlie Schreiner III, 

in the fall of 1961 and continued as a regular guest there well into my young adulthood. In 1980, 

I covered the Y.O.’s all-night 100-year birthday bash for the Austin American-Statesman, where at the 

time I was a staff writer. Charlie and I became friends and I later served with “Three” (as everyone 

called him) on the board of directors of the Former Texas Ranger Association Foundation. 

Someone should do a book on the Schreiner family and its myriad influences on Kerrville. 

With all respect to the descendants of Kerrville namesake James Kerr, by all rights, Kerrville should 

have been named for Captain Charles Schreiner, an 1852 immigrant to Texas from Alsace-Lorraine 

who settled in Kerr County shortly after its founding. He and his children, grandchildren and 

great-grandchildren contributed incredibly and in many ways to Kerrville. 

But to tell that story in the depth it deserves is beyond the scope of this book, which is an 

illustrated overview of Kerrville’s history. It is an interesting city that enjoys one of the most attractive 

settings in the state. 

Demographically, Kerrville is a mixture of fourth- and fifth-generation residents and newcomers, 

many of the newer arrivals being retirees who continue to move to this Hill Country city (the area’s 

largest) for its climate, scenery, a wide range of things to do and excellent healthcare. One of its 

residents, Joseph Luther, is a combination of both types—a Kerrville native who left for a long career 

in academia and then decided it was where he and his wife Vicky wanted to retire. 

A PhD historian and avocational archeologist, he has written two books dealing with area history 

and is a former member of the Kerr County Historical Commission. My thanks to him for providing 

a lot of help on this book, including squiring me around in his SUV for a VIP tour of historic sites 

and then reading and commenting on the manuscript. 

A third category of resident is Laura Bechtel, a relatively new arrival who came to Kerrville from 

Ohio to serve as director of the Butt-Holdsworth Memorial Library. Even though the library’s history 

center was closed for remodeling, she graciously facilitated my access to the library’s archival 

holdings on Kerrville and her staff provided digital copies of many of the vintage photographic 

images in this book. A shout-out also to Austinite Ned Coleman, a longtime dealer in vintage 

postcards and old friend, who allowed me to scan assorted Kerrville cards in his inventory, including 

a never-published photo of the record Guadalupe River flood in 1932. 

Finally, my thanks to Beverly Waak, who gave my manuscript its first edit and traveled with me 

when I went to Kerrville to do research and picture-taking. In addition, she cheerfully donned white 

gloves to help me select images from the Butt-Holdsworth Library collection. 

I certainly hope you enjoy reading about Kerrville’s interesting history. If it doesn’t convince you 

to move to the Hill Country “capital” city, I bet this book will make you want to visit. 

Mike Cox 

Austin, Texas 


THE HISTORY OF KERRVILLE & 

KERR COUNTY 

When Joshua David Brown began cogitating on who the new county he’d had a hand in creating 

should be named for, his late friend James Kerr came to mind. 

So far as is known, Kerr had never set foot along the upper Guadalupe River, a full two day’s ride 

west of San Antonio, but Brown figured his well-thought-of fellow Kentuckian deserved recognition 

for the part he had played in Texas’s evolution from Mexican province to independent republic and 

finally, as the twenty-eighth state of the Union. Born in 1790 in Danville, Kentucky, when it was still 

a part of Virginia, Kerr fought in the War of 1812 and served as a senator in Missouri before coming 

to Texas in 1825 as surveyor general for colonizer Green DeWitt. With famed scout and ranger 

Erastus (Deaf) Smith and five other men, Kerr selected and surveyed a site at the confluence of the 

Guadalupe and San Marcos rivers that would become the town of Gonzales. 

As Texas moved toward independence from Mexico, Kerr took part in the Battle of Lipantitlán in 

the late fall of 1835 and also rode for a time as a Texas Ranger. Though always willing to fight, he 

also played a political role in forging what became the Republic of Texas, later elected to its Congress. 

Trained as an attorney and doctor as well as in surveying, Kerr spent the rest of his life in Jackson 

County. By the time Kerr died in 1850, Texas had been part of the United States for five years. 

At 17, Brown came to Texas from Kentucky in 1833 with his parents, a brother and a sister. The 

family settled in Sabine County and his mother and father stayed there the rest of their lives. The Texas 

Revolution broke out in October 1835, and while some have written that Brown fought at the Battle of 

San Jacinto in 1836, the record only supports his later service in the Republic of Texas’s military during 

the 1839 Cherokee campaign in East Texas and in the Battle of Salado Creek following a Mexican 

incursion into Texas in 1842. He also participated in the disastrous Mier Expedition later that year. 

Brown’s early days in Texas are not as well documented as Kerr’s. Papers held at the state General Land 

Office do show that for his military service to the republic, in 1846 Brown received title to 640 acres in 

the Gonzales area. The same year, he rode for a time with Ben McCulloch’s Texas Ranger company. By 

then 30 years old, Brown turned to domestic life a bit later than many men. On July 20, 1846, he married 

❖ 

Kerrville’s first settlers followed the 

Guadalupe River up from Gonzales in 

the late 1840s. 

COURTESY OF NED COLEMAN. 

The History of Kerrville & Kerr County ✦ 5

Eleanor Smith in Gonzales and a year later, they 

had a daughter. At some point during his time 

in the Gonzales area, Brown became acquainted 

with Kerr. Though separated in age by twenty-six 

years, they developed a friendship. 

While Brown’s suggestion in 1856 that the 

newly created political subdivision in the Hill 

Country be called Kerr County, a less modest 

man might have put his friends up to suggesting 

that he be the namesake of the 1,101-squaremile 

area the legislature had carved from Bexar 

County. After all, he had been its first settler. 

No matter its namesake, the story of Kerr 

County and its principal town of Kerrville goes 

back much further in time, long before people 

of European descent became interested in what 

would become Texas. 

Artifacts excavated by archeologists in the 

Kerrville area show that hunter-gatherers 

whose ancestors had migrated onto the North 

American continent from Asia lived along the 

upper Guadalupe River as long as 12,000 years 

ago. The common identifier of this culture and 

time period are chipped flint dart tips called 

Clovis points, a variety of artifact first found 

in the vicinity of Clovis, New Mexico. Retired 

University of Nebraska professor and Kerrville 

native Dr. Joseph Luther notes that the early 

peoples who occupied the area lived off longvanished 

megafauna that included giant species 

(at least as compared to most animals today) 

such as the Columbian elephant, mammoth, 

mastodon and giant bison. They took down 

those animals with spears tipped with flint 

points made from the ample quantities of chert 

found throughout the Hill Country. 

By the seventeenth century, two adversarial 

European powers—Spain and France—vied for 

possession of what had come to be called the 

New World. The Spanish Crown’s concern that 

the French might have succeeded in establishing 

a presence in what is now Texas is what 

indirectly led to the naming of the spring-fed 

stream that would be the genesis of Kerrville. 

In the spring of 1689, Spanish explorer and 

provincial governor Alonso De Leon guided 

an entrada north across the Rio Grande in search 

of a reported French colony somewhere on 

the Texas coast. The official, leading 114 men, 

skirted the lower Hill Country as he moved eastsoutheast. 

On April 14, likely in present Victoria 

County, his expedition came to a tree-lined river. 

De Leon named the stream in honor of Our 

Lady of Guadalupe, a name that stuck in Texas. 

France and Spain, on the other hand, did not. 

The stream De Leon named forms with the 

merger of two branches in the Edwards Plateau, 

more than 230 miles to the northwest of its 

mouth at San Antonio Bay. While De Leon never 

saw the upper reaches of the river he named, 

later Spanish military expeditions—sent from 

San Antonio de Bexar to engage the Lipan 

Apaches and Comanches who frequently raided 

the Spanish settlement—crossed the Guadalupe 

where Kerrville is now. 

In 1767, the Marques de Rubi led an inspection 

tour through part of future Kerr County. 

We traveled four leagues [12 miles] southeast 

along the river’s floodplain through extended 

plains covered with pasture that creates the 

appearance of a great shore…. Tall stands of 

cypress, cottonwood, and live oak grow on the 

banks of the river and are constantly in view.” 

Other expeditions, both exploratory and 

military, crossed through the area periodically. 

Spanish soldiers fought Apaches and 

Comanches on several occasions along the 

upper Guadalupe, but in time Spain finally 

grasped that it could neither kill nor convert 

to Christianity all the Indians in Texas. Even if 

the empire had the stomach to keep trying, 

that issue became moot when disaffected 

Spaniards and a growing population of the 

progeny of Spaniards and Mexican Indians 

revolted against the Crown and established an 

independent Mexican nation. 

Swiss botanist Jean Louis Berlandier, a 

member of the 1828 Mexican boundary and 

scientific expedition, visited the area of future 

Kerrville while buffalo hunting. Guided by 

friendly-for-the-moment Comanches and 

escorted by Mexican cavalrymen, Berlandier 

left San Antonio on November 19. Nine days 

later, as he later reported, they “…reached 

some rocky hillocks, known to the Mexicans 

as the ‘Pedernales’” and killed their first buffalo. 

Near the headwaters of the Guadalupe, 

the party found an old Lipan Apache village. 

“I saw their principal farm, which is known as 

the Labor de los Lipanes, the Lipans’ Field,” 


he wrote. “The North Americans used to come 

there to buy the mules and the horses the 

Lipans had stolen, in exchange for weapons and 

farm tools.” 

While Mexicans or Anglos occasionally 

crossed the Guadalupe where Kerrville would 

develop, not until Texas had gone through its 

near-decade as an independent republic and 

joined the union at the twenty-eighth state did 

anyone even remotely deem it practicable to 

live in that area. A federal military presence 

gave what turned out to be a false impression of 

security for those who did venture to the upper 

reaches of the river. 

In 1848, to protect the area from Indians, 

the Army established Fort Martin Scott, a post 

two miles east of Fredericksburg, and roughly 

twenty-two miles from what would become 

Kerrville. But while the garrison arguably 

added to the security of the nearby German 

community founded in 1846, its sphere of 

influence did not extend very far. 

Meanwhile, in the mid-summer of 1848 

Joshua Brown suffered a terrible loss with the 

death of his wife of less than two years. Soon, 

leaving his daughter with his late wife’s family, 

Brown left Gonzales and travelled up the 

Guadalupe to Curry’s Creek, in what is now 

Kendall County. Whether he did that hoping to 

outride his grief, or simply out of a desire to see 

new country, he at least discovered what 

seemed to be a good way to make a living off 

the land—shingle making. At Curry’s Creek, he 

found a small community of men who felled 

thick cypress trees and with froe and drawing 

knife, produced roofing material that could be 

sold in San Antonio, where a robust market 

existed. The process was hard, but the profit 

was good, so he threw in with them for a time 

and learned the trade. 

One problem with this new Hill Country 

industry was renewability of the resource. With 

a potential life span of 600 years, cypress grow 

slowly albeit grandly. While the shingle-making 

business flourished along Curry’s Creek, the 

supply of the giant trees was dwindling. 

Keeping an eye out for hostile Indians, Brown 

rode farther upriver in search of more cypress. 

Along the upper Guadalupe in what would 

become Kerr County, more than 135 winding 

river miles from Gonzales, he found ample 

virgin timber. 

Brown returned to Gonzales, where in May 

1849 he married Sarah Jane Goss, a preacher’s 

daughter. Hoping to provide for a family that 

would grow, he found ten area men interested 

in joining him in the shingle-making business. 

With his new wife, he led the men upstream to 

the cypress-lined river crossing he had found 

the year before. 

The area had a bountiful supply of eight-toten-feet-diameter 

cypress, good water, and plenty 

of game for the taking. The only problem with 

Brown’s choice of location was the proximity of 

❖ 

Bald cypress trees attracted shingle 

makers to the future site of Kerrville 

in the early 1850s. 



❖ 

Above: A Kerrville old-timer 

demonstrates the nearly lost art of 

making shingles by hand. 

COURTESY OF THE BUTT-HOLDSWORTH 

MEMORIAL LIBRARY. 

Opposite, top: Kerrville and Kerr 

County were named for early-day 

Texas patriot James Kerr, a friend of 

pioneer settler Joshua D. Brown. 

PHOTO BY MIKE COX. 

Opposite, bottom: Kerrville started 

out as a collection of log cabins. 



hostile Indians. He and his fellow entrepreneurs 

found enough Indian sign to convince them that 

the area was not safe, even for battle-tested 

Texans, which most of them were. Desiring to 

keep their scalps, the Brown party moved 

downriver back to Gonzales County. 

In the early 1850s, Brown and his family 

returned to the upper river. The Indian threat 

had not ended, but Texas Ranger scouting 

expeditions had lessened the likelihood of 

depredations. Other settlers—married men with 

families and younger, single men—followed, 

and soon a modest colony of shingle-makers 

plied their trade along the river. (And some 

hardy men, their names lost to history, may 

already have been there.) 

Another early arrival in future Kerr County, 

Julius Dresel, described the German element of 

the shingle-maker sub-culture in his diary: 

[U]nemployed German gentlemen…could 

live an entirely independent life, occupying 

themselves by hunting and reading in jolly 

company. At times, from half to a whole dozen 

unattached young men lived in the caves formed 

by the overhanging rocks in the [Guadalupe 

River] bottoms…. They were often students 

who chopped down the cypresses…. Here they 

formed an interesting gypsy group in the cool 

thicket under the giant trees. Fraternity brothers 

hunted deer, turkey, panther, and bear, on horseback 

and on foot. Usually they worked quite 

hard because money was chronically absent, and 

one thousand shingles brought in six dollars. 

Fed by clear, cool, surging springs, the 

Guadalupe normally had a substantial flow. 

In addition to the shingle-making camps, 

water-powered mills began to go up along the 

upper river. At first millers turned cypress 

trees into lumber, but soon they were grinding 

corn and wheat. Beginning with the building of 

the first mill in 1854, at least ten mills 

harnessing hydraulic power would develop 

along the Guadalupe before electricity made 

them obsolete. 

While Brown is credited as being the area’s 

first settler, in a strictly legal sense, he started 

out as a squatter. Most of future Kerrville, 

at least on paper, belonged to one Benjamin F. 

Cage, a veteran of the 1836 Battle of San Jacinto 

who had received 640 acres along the 

Guadalupe for his military service. The first 

person to purchase land in what would become 

Kerr County was German immigrant Frederick 

Heinrich Schladoer, who bought 1,006 acres 

for $1,200 on May 3, 1852. The next day he 

conveyed half of that land to his father-in-law, 

Carl Wilhelm Wiedenfeld. Two years later, 

Tennessean J. Clark Ridley became the future 

county’s largest property owner when he 

bought 2,240 acres. Another two years would 

go by before Brown ponied up any money 

for acreage. 

On his land, about 400 yards above the 

Guadalupe River, Ridley built a large house 

about 10 miles downstream from future Kerrville 

in the area that would develop into Center Point. 

The exact location of the structure, long since 

razed, has not been determined but it is 

believed to have stood at the end of what is now 

Wyatt Street in that community. 

Brown initially plied his shingle-making 

business at a point on the Guadalupe about 

twenty miles southeast of future Kerrville. Since 

he had been the first in the area, the small 

community of shingle-makers came to be 

known as Brownsborough. A perception later 

developed that Brownsborough was Kerrville’s 

first name, but they were separate communities. 

At some point, possibly because the cypress 

supply was dwindling, Brown moved to the area 

that would become Kerrville. 

Though scattered here and there, by middecade, 

enough people lived along or near the 

Guadalupe to want the convenience of a county 


seat closer to them than San Antonio. Meeting 

at the Ridley’s residence, roughly eighty men 

“laboring under great embarrassment, owing to 

the remoteness from their respective county 

seats…” signed a petition beseeching the 

Texas legislature to create a new county. Their 

desire was that “the Guadalupe River may be 

central in passing through it [the new county], 

to include such limits and territory as your 

honorable body’s wisdom may seem proper 

and reasonable.” 

Governor Elisha M. Pease signed into law the 

legislation creating Kerr County on January 26, 

1856. The bill named Ridley as commissioner in 

charge of seeing to the organization of the new 

political subdivision, one of 16 counties born by 

legislative fiat that year. 

On March 22, male, white residents of the 

nascent county (the only citizens allowed to vote 

back then) cast their ballots in favor of Kerrville 

as the seat of county government. By three votes, 

26 for Kerrville, 23 for Comfort, the people spoke. 

It was an election, old-timers used to say, that 

advocates of Kerrville stole “fair and square.” This 

was accomplished, a German woman noted in her 

1901 memoir, because the “American settlers who 

resided in the small colony of Brownsborough 

gathered relatives and friends from all areas of 

the state in order to out-vote the Germans.” 

Brown had promised to furnish land for the 

new county seat if voters chose Kerrville. True to 

his word, on May 15, 1856, Brown purchased 

the 640-acre Gage grant along the Guadalupe. 

At $2 an acre, the acquisition cost $1,280. 

Five days after closing on that real estate, 

Brown deeded four acres to the new county for 

use as a public square in the soon-to-be-platted 

Kerrville town site. In addition, he gave land for 

the town’s streets as well as a “good sized lot 

fronting on the public square for county use [a 

courthouse], one lot for public church, one lot for 

public school, and one lot suitable for a jail….” 

In 1857, master miller Christian Dietert built a 

mill on a bluff southwest of present Water Street, 

in an area between what is now Earl Garrett and 

A Street. The mill, which grew into the largest 

west of New Braunfels and San Antonio, formed 

the nucleus of the new settlement. 

At the time, the community consisted of 

only “a cluster of five small log huts, of one or 

two rooms” standing in a clearing above the 

Guadalupe amid “a wilderness of trees, and grass 

as high as a man,” Dietert’s widow Rosalie later 

told her young granddaughter. “Your grandfather 

built the sixth house.” 

More than two years would pass before anyone 

could send a letter or parcel to or from the new 

county seat. Residents had to travel to Comfort to 


❖ 

Early settlers harnessed the 

Guadalupe River to run saw mills and 

to grind corn and grain. 

COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR. 

do that. The post office did not get around to 

opening a station in Kerrville until June 9, 1858. 

(Early on, Kerrville was called Kerrsville, but 

Kerrsville would lose its “s” in 1866.) 

Deed records show that the first person to buy 

a town lot was Daniel Arnold, whose occupation 

was listed as “bear hunter.” Arnold purchased 

Lot 99, but did not build on it immediately, if 

ever. By 1859, he was still living near the log 

courthouse in a ramshackle shelter that had 

to be supported by poles to keep it standing. 

Brown and his family lived in a cabin that stood 

on high ground about where the A. C. Schreiner 

house would later be built at 529 Water Street. 

By 1860 federal census takers counted 634 

people living in Kerr County, 49 of them slaves. 

Kerrville had 68 residents belonging to 14 families. 

The military abandoned Fort Martin Scott in 

April 1853, but returned to the area, this time 

in Kerr County, in 1856 with the establishment 

of Camp Verde only twelve miles from Kerrville. 

Not only did cavalrymen stationed at Camp 

Verde patrol the area on the lookout for Indians, 

in 1857 the camp became a major participant in 

one of the more unique experiments in American 

military history—the use of African camels to 

carry soldiers and equipment. Thirty-three 

camels and a dozen Armenians to handle them 

arrived at the port of Indianola along the middle 

coast, and Camp Verde served for a time as the 

home of the Army’s short-lived Camel corps. 

The idea of using beasts of burden from 

the Middle East in the Western United States 

came from Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, 

a Mississippian who in 1861 would become 

president of the Confederate States of America. 

One of the officers who spent some time at 

Camp Verde was Robert E. Lee, who at the 

beginning of the Civil War returned to his 

native Virginia, resigned his commission 

and became the ranking general in the 

Confederate Army. 

When Texas voted on whether to secede 

from the Union, Kerr County approved the 

idea, but not by a landslide. The final count 

was 76 for secession, 57 against. That balloting 

reflected an ideological split that portended 

trouble for the Hill Country. 

The bloodiest battles of the Civil War 

happened in other states far from Kerrville, 

but the small community and surrounding Kerr 

County residents did not escape the war. Local 

men signed up to fight on both sides, though 

most opted to support the South. While the 

enlistees were away, Southern partisans and 

Union sympathizers (mostly German settlers 

who wanted nothing of slavery or war) 

clashed in Kerr and neighboring Gillespie 

Counties. It amounted to a mini-Civil War in 

the Hill Country, an ugly chapter in the area’s 

history replete with lynchings, assassinations 

and massacres. 


Another conflict playing out during the Civil 

War had to do with whether Kerrville would continue 

as the seat of government for Kerr County. 

Citizens of rival Comfort had never gotten over 

losing the initial election to determine the county 

seat, and not quite four years after voters had 

picked Kerrville, county commissioners set a 

second election on the matter for March 31, 1860. 

If Kerrville residents had rigged the first election in 

their favor in 1856, Comfort supporters returned 

the compliment and succeeded in getting most of 

the ballots cast in and around Kerrville tossed 

out. That done, Comfort finally reigned as the 

new county seat. Even so, as if county residents 

did not have enough to worry about with a 

bloody rebellion wracking the nation, yet another 

election on the matter was set for October 24, 

1862. Once again, Comfort prevailed. 

Texas is dotted with the faded remnants of 

once-vital communities that became ghost 

towns after they lost their status as county 

seats, and Comfort’s gain could have been 

catastrophic for the future of Kerrville. The 

legislature finally settled the matter when it 

created Kendall County in 1862. The line 

separating Kerr County from the new county 

was drawn a half-mile west of Comfort, thus 

making it a town in Kendall County. 

One of the tens of thousands Texans who 

fought hard, if in vain, for the Confederacy was 

Charles Armand Schreiner. Born in 1838 in the 

mountains of Alsace-Lorraine, France, he had 

come with his family to Texas in September 

1852. The family settled in San Antonio, where 

his 52-year-old father soon died. Four years 

later, his mother died at 48 from a snakebite. 

Except for his siblings—three brothers and a 

sister—he was on his own. 

Only 16, Schreiner first rode as a Texas 

Ranger in 1854, periodically serving under 

various captains. While scouting for Indians 

with the rangers, he saw the Hill Country for 

the first time. As historian J. Evetts Haley later 

wrote, “[H]e must have reasoned that a man 

was foolish to range and rove, and thirst and 

starve, in such a bountifully attractive land….” 

In 1857, Schreiner took up ranching with 

his brother-in-law, Caspar Real. He lived with 

his sister Emilie and Real in a log cabin on 

Turtle Creek in the vicinity of Camp Verde. 

Census takers in 1860 listed his occupation as 

farmer, but his “crop” came in on four feet. 

Not quite six months after the outbreak 

of the Civil War, Schreiner married Mary 

Magdalene Enderle on October 1, 1861. Soon 

after, he enlisted in the Confederate army at 

❖ 

Captain Charles Schreiner built this 

two-story stone house in the heart of 

Kerrville in 1878. 



❖ 

For most of his life, Charles Schreiner 

continued to diversify his business 

interests, including establishing a bank 

that would stay in his family’s hands 

until 1990. 


San Antonio. After service throughout the rest 

of the conflict, Schreiner was mustered out in 

San Antonio in 1865. One story has it that he 

walked from San Antonio back to Turtle Creek 

in Kerr County with only five gold dollars to 

his name. 

Even after the war, the county still lay well 

beyond the more settled, relatively safer eastern 

half of the state—the small burg of Kerrville 

being non-existent on most maps. In fact, 

a map drawn by A. von Steinwehr for a 

primary school geography textbook printed in 

Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1870 showed nothing of 

the western half of Texas other than a reddishorange 

shaded outline of its borders with Indian 

Territory (Oklahoma), New Mexico and Mexico, 

the region’s significant rivers, and a distant 

mountain range ominously labeled “Apache 

Mts.” Anyone, pupil or adult, studying this map 

would see that Fredericksburg was the westernmost 

town in Texas. Beyond the nearly twentyfive-year-old 

predominantly German settlement, 

at least in the view of most Americans, extended 

nothing but a vast, open land. As the nationally 

distributed grade school text put it, while 

agriculture was “the chief occupation of its 

inhabitants,” Texas nevertheless abounded in 

“panthers, bears, antelopes, and other wild 

animals. Large herds of wild horses roam over 

the prairies….” West Texas, in particular, hardly 

seemed like a place a cautious person would 

want to venture across, much less live. 

Schreiner understood that staying in that part 

of the state would be a dangerous undertaking. 

But he must also have grasped that all that open 

land, no matter the hostile Indians who still saw 

it as their home, offered fine economic potential 

to anyone willing to take a chance. Even so, with 

a growing family that would eventually include 

eight children, Schreiner barely got by. However, 

what he lacked in cash, he made up for it in 

fortitude, energy and innovative thinking. 

On Christmas Eve 1869—with $10,000 put 

up by August Faltin of Comfort—Schreiner 

opened a general store in a 16 by 24-foot 

cypress plank building at the intersection of 

Water and Mountain (now Earl Garrett) Streets 

in Kerrville. Before closing for the day, the store 

had sold 7.5 pounds of coffee and two quarts 

of whiskey—on credit. Whoever bought that 

liquor probably intended to enjoy eggnog and 

toast the arrival of a new year, but whiskey also 

dulled the ongoing pain of Reconstruction and 

the terrible memories that haunted many Texans 

who had fought in the Civil War. 

Tens of thousands of the state’s young men had 

been killed and wounded or died of disease during 

the Civil War, but Texas—never successfully 

invaded by the North—had escaped most of 

the physical devastation of the bloody four-year 

conflict. Unlike Georgia and other Southern states, 

its cities did not lay in smoke-stained ruin, but 

Texas’s economy had nearly been destroyed. 

Not that the state lacked certain assets that 

could be converted into cash. Over much of 

southwest Texas, long-horned, thick-hided, 

four-legged “dollars” managed to live well off 

the semi-arid land, wild cattle descended from 

strayed Spanish stock brought to the New 

World in the eighteenth century. Enterprising 

Texans realized that all that livestock, free for 

the taking and branding, could supply ample 

protein for a growing nation. The only problem 

with that otherwise spot-on business model was 

the lack of a close market. The state had no 

railroad connection allowing for easy transport 

of longhorns to beef-hungry northern markets. 

To hitch supply to demand, Texas ranchers 

began rounding up Longhorns and walking them 

north to the railheads, first to Sedalia, Missouri, 

and starting in 1867 to Abilene, Kansas. The 

Chisholm Trail, beginning in the brush country 

south of San Antonio, became the best known 

route. But a route lying farther to the west, known 

initially as the Dodge City Trail and soon simply 

as the Western Trail, passed through Kerrville. 

The trail had been blazed by a Pennsylvaniaborn 

South Texas rancher, John W. Lytle. In 

addition to herding his own stock to market, 

Lytle became the range industry’s equivalent of 

a riverboat pilot, leading herds gathered by 


other ranchers up the trail he had developed. 

His enterprise soon caught the attention of 

Schreiner, who in 1874, along with Kimble 

County rancher John W. Light, bought an 

interest in Lytle’s firm, infusing the business 

with new funding and the shiny patina of the 

captain’s already favorable reputation. 

Not only did Schreiner derive income from 

his interest in the trail-driving enterprise and 

the shipping pens he had built in Kerrville, the 

captain moved tens of thousands of his own 

Longhorns up the trail. And Kerrville’s emergence 

in the mid-1870s as a cow town did nothing to 

harm his bottom line at his general store. 

But cattle were not the only animals that 

could get by on the semi-arid land of Southwest 

Texas. Schreiner and Caspar Real had pioneered 

sheep raising in the area, successfully breeding 

Delaines to his flock to produce better wool. 

Soon he also began raising goats. 

“He probably did more than any other Texan 

to encourage the combined use of these 

animals on the same range where cattle ate the 

long grass, sheep the short grass and goats the 

leaves of trees and shrubs—the Texas range 

livestock triumvirate,” wrote historian Paul 

Carlson of Schreiner. 

Schreiner’s three-pronged approach to 

ranching not only enhanced his success, it 

helped transform Kerrville from a town with a 

courthouse and a few businesses into a regional 

agricultural center. Ranchers came to Kerrville 

for their supplies, giving Schreiner’s store a 

steady business, and freight wagons hauled 

wool and mohair from there to San Antonio and 

the state’s coastal bend. 

Before long, the astute Alsatian-Texan had 

enough cash to begin loaning money to others, 

the beginning of Schreiner’s soon to be quite 

profitable banking business. Long before the 

advent of complicated government banking 

regulations, Schreiner for a time had a unique 

qualifier for a loan: Part of the funds had to be 

used to buy sheep. 

While an increasingly successful young 

capitalist, Schreiner had not forgotten what the 

business end of a Winchester was for. On June 

30, 1873, a rowdy-looking group of cowboys 

walked into his store, ostensibly to have a drink 

or two. But what they really had in mind was 

relieving Schreiner of any money he had on 

hand. Unluckily for them, the captain had 

been tipped off as to their true intentions and 

members of the local minute man company 

that he commanded had been strategically 

positioned outside to await developments. 

One of the strangers unwisely shot at a local 

resident inside the store and the minute men 

opened up on the party. When the smoke 

cleared, five of the outlaws were dead and 

several lay moaning in spreading pools of blood 

or staggering around wounded to various 

❖ 

Hundreds of thousands of longhorn 

cattle passed through Kerrville in 

the 1870s and ’80s along the 

Western Trail. 




❖ 

Right: Different headgear for different 

generations, but the work was the 

same when it came to shearing sheep. 



Below: Kerrville reigned for decades 

as the hub of Texas’ sheep and 

goat country. 


Opposite, top: Cattle raising has been 

an important part of the Kerrville 

economy since shortly after the 

Civil War. 



Opposite, bottom: Until the state 

highway department started paving 

roadways in the Hill Country, the 

easiest way to get to Kerrville was 

by rail. 




❖ 

Opposite, top: Kerr County’s third 

courthouse, built in 1886, continued 

in use until the mid-1920s. 



Opposite, bottom: Constructed in 

1926, the county’s fifth courthouse 

remains in use. 


extents. The survivors had mounted their horses 

and galloped out of town, the minutemen in 

hot pursuit. The Kerrville men caught up with 

the robbers about eight miles from town and 

surrounded a house where they had holed up. 

Newspaper accounts are sketchy as to what 

happened next, but the Galveston News reported 

later in July that some twenty outlaws had been 

killed in the area recently. 

Two years later, when five horse thieves hit 

town and appropriated two head of other people’s 

stock, Schreiner led a group of his minutemen 

in pursuit. Thirty miles upriver, the ranger-like 

unit and their tracking hounds caught up with 

the thieves and mortally wounded one of them. 

Ten horses had been recovered, with another 

accidentally killed in the exchange of gunfire. 

Even though the minutemen had recovered 

the stolen stock, they rode on after the other 

thieves. “The Highwaymen Come to Grief!,” the 

San Antonio Express reported on June 16, 1875. 

“Captain Schreiner and the Kerrville Minute Men 

Do Their Business.” 

Not for another year would Kerrville residents 

have a local source of news. Twenty years after 

the county’s organization, the county seat got its 

first newspaper, The Frontiersman. It stayed in 

business for five years before its owner relocated 

to Bandera. More than three years went by until 

someone started the Kerrville Eye, the town’s 

second, but also short-lived newspaper. 

About to turn forty, the captain had proven to 

be adept at whatever business he undertook, be 

it frontier law enforcement, ranching or some 

other form of commercial enterprise. In 1878, 

he hired noted San Antonio architect Alfred 

Giles to design for his large family an equally 

expansive two-story stone house that still 

stands at 226 East Earl Garrett Street. The most 

impressive structure in Kerrville at the time, 

it soon became known as the Schreiner Mansion. 

Schreiner had a deserved reputation as being 

hard on Indians and outlaws, a hard-working 

rancher and an astute businessman, but he was 

not above having a little fun. One story has 

him, as a young man, participating in a weekly 

footrace from the end of Mountain Street 

(now Earl Garrett Street) to a certain saloon. 

The last man to belly up to the bar bought 

the drinks. Reportedly, the captain never lost 

a race. 

Clearly, the captain was doing well as a 

rancher-merchant. A decade after having gone 

into business, in consideration of $50,000, 

Schreiner bought out his partner and Faltin’s 

went off the store’s sign. From then on, it was 

just Schreiner General Merchandise. Three years 

later, in 1882, he purchased the Dietert Mill, 

which had a flour mill and cotton gin. The old 

mill, which at its peak produced 140 barrels 

of flour a day, would stand until it was razed 

in 1920. 

More than two decades after Kerrville’s 

founding, hostile Indians remained a threat. 

Comanches killed four children in the summer 

of 1878. State rangers and local minutemen 

under Schreiner rode after the marauders, but 

they lost their trail. Tragic as it was, at least 

the incident proved to be the final Indian raid 

in the area. 

In 1880, with income from the cattle, sheep 

and goat business, his store and a newly 

founded bank, Schreiner bought the 550,000- 

acre Taylor-Clements Ranch. The previous 

owners had branded their cattle with a YO, and 

Schreiner kept that name for his new property 

roughly forty miles west of Kerrville. 

By the early 1880s, Kerrville had homes, 

business buildings, a substantial hotel, several 

well-patronized saloons (as well as at least one 

bawdy house), a courthouse and a jail. But no 

church. To remedy that, Mrs. Whitfield Scott, 

whose husband owned the recently constructed 

St. Charles Hotel, rode horseback from house 

to house with her sister to collect money for 

a multi-denominational house of worship to 

be built on land donated by Schreiner. The 

first services were conducted in the new Union 

Church in 1885. Each of four denominations 

used the church on alternate Sundays. 

For Kerrville’s first thirty-plus years, ranching 

and related businesses drove its economy. But 

that changed in 1887, when the San Antonio 

and Aransas Pass Railroad reached town. That 

came about not so much out of anyone’s desire 

to extend rail service to Kerrville, but from an 

ambition to connect the Alamo City with the 

Gulf of Mexico. 

Though San Antonio had gained its first rail 

connection in 1877, the business community 

wanted a more direct route from there to 

the mid-Texas coast. Organized in 1886 to 




accomplish that end, the San Antonio and 

Aransas Pass linked the city to the Gulf at 

Aransas Pass the following year. But the movers 

and shakers of Bexar County wanted more. 

The Panhandle had begun to develop, and 

San Antonio businessmen—not to mention the 

railroad’s management—wanted to capitalize 

on that growing market. Accordingly, the SAAP 

decided to lay track northwest from San 

Antonio. Fredericksburg and Kerrville both 

vied for the line, but the railroad wanted 

$180,000 to provide service. 

In the early 1870s, Schreiner had been a 

merchant and hometown ranger when the 

need arose. But by the 1880s, now a rancher 

with expanded and diversified business 

interests, he had become a wealthy civic leader. 

He led the drive to raise the money the SAAP 

wanted, contributing a large share himself, and 

Kerrville prevailed. 

Greeted by music from the Fredericksburg 

Mexican Brass Band, the first train—six Pullman 

cars behind the steam locomotive A. C. Schryver 

—rolled into Kerrville at 11:45 a.m. on October 6, 

1887. It carried 502 passengers, roughly two 

hundred more people than lived there. A parade, 

speechifying and barbecue (14 beeves, 20 sheep 

and enough young goats for plenty of cabrito) 

marked the occasion. Everyone thought Kerrville 

was about to take off faster than a highballing 

locomotive on a downgrade. Prior to this time, 

traveling to San Antonio from Kerrville amounted 

to a two-day trip, with an overnight stop in 

Boerne. Now, by rail, it took only three hours. 

Soon, everyone believed, the rail line would 

continue to San Angelo and the high plains, 

bringing even more prosperity to the town. But 

construction of the seventy-one miles of track 

from San Antonio to Kerrville had proven more 

costly than the railroad’s management expected 

and Kerrville became the end of the line. While 

bad for the company’s stockholders, being the 

railroad’s terminal point was still good news for 

Kerrville—at least for the time being. 

For one thing, having rail service served as 

the impetus for Kerrville’s incorporation. Within 

two years after the arrival of that first train, the 

population had increased to a thousand. Meeting 

in the office of attorney Robert H. Burney on 

August 23, 1889, a group of businessmen 

decided the time had come for incorporation. 

Not long afterward, fifty “qualified voters of 

Kerrville, Texas” signed a petition requesting 

incorporation “for municipal purposes, in 

accordance to the laws of the State of Texas” 

and presented it to County Judge W. G. Garrett. 

On September 7, 1889, county residents voted 

on whether Kerrville should have a city 

government. Fewer than ten percent of its 

residents bothered to vote, but of the 98 who did 

cast ballots, 95 voted “Yes” for incorporation. 

Elected as the town’s first mayor was 

Joseph A. Tivy, a Canadian-born surveyor who 

had come to Texas in 1837 with his two sisters. 

They settled in San Antonio, which is where 

he met the celebrated ranger “Bigfoot” Wallace. 

The frontiersman accompanied Tivy on a 

survey along the Llano River and Tivy later 

made field notes along the Guadalupe River in 

what would become Kerr County. 

In 1844, he enlisted for a time in the Texas 

Rangers. But when gold was discovered in 

California, Tivy and his siblings left for what 

they hoped would be richer fields, literally 

and figuratively. After eight years in California 

and a short time in New Mexico, the three Tivys 

❖ 

Opposite page: During the earlier 

decades of the twentieth century, 

each of the major denominations built 

churches in Kerrville. These are early 

images of the First Presbyterian 

Church (top) and the First Baptist 

Church (bottom). 

PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY OF NED COLEMAN. 

Above: Civic leaders built a union 

church in 1885 for use by four 

different denominations on 

varying Sundays. 



❖ 

Above: On land donated by Captain 

Joseph Tivy, a new high school named 

in his honor opened in 1891. 



Opposite, top: One of the earlier 

known views of downtown Kerrville, 

taken in the 1890s. 



Opposite, middle: As a youngster 

future World War Two Admiral 

Chester Nimitz lived with his family 

in the St. Charles Hotel in the 

early 1900s. 


Opposite, bottom: Kerrville Roller 

Mills located on Water Street, 1908. 

COURTESY OF THE KERRVILLE MOUNTAIN SUN. 

returned to Texas. He left again to fight in the 

Civil War. After the war, he and his sisters took 

up residence in Karnes County. 

Remembering with fondness the country he 

had seen as a surveyor and ranger, in 1872 

Tivy moved to Kerrville and acquired extensive 

acreage in and around the town. 

For whatever reason, years before, Tivy and 

his sisters had vowed to each other that they 

would not marry. But Tivy had plenty of male 

friends, including a local doctor. At one point, 

the two men took a trip to East Texas, and while 

they were away, the doctor died unexpectedly. 

In 1875, Tivy decided to break the pact with his 

sisters and married the doctor’s widow. Furious, 

the two sisters left Texas. Tivy stayed, opening a 

hotel in 1884. 

Though Tivy had chosen to disregard his 

arrangement with his sisters by getting married, 

in 1888 he readily honored his wife’s last wish— 

to be buried on the highest point overlooking 

Kerrville, a prominence that would come to be 

known as Tivy Mountain. The grieving widower 

had a road blasted to the top, and his wife’s 

casket was laboriously taken to her final resting 

place in a wagon pulled by two mules. Soon, her 

beloved cat meowed its last and Tivy had it 

buried near his wife. Later, when his youngest 

sister died (she had forgiven her brother and 

moved back to Kerrville), he buried her up 

there, as well. Making it known that he intended 

when he died to join his wife, her cat, and 

his sister there, he told friends who asked why 

he wanted to be buried on a mountain top, 

“I do not wish to drown after I am already dead.” 

In addition to his sense of humor, Tivy had 

a philanthropic bent. On August 16, 1890, he 

closed on the transfer of 160-plus acres to the 

City of Kerrville for construction of a public 

school. The gift included both land for a stone 

school house and acreage that could be sold to 

pay for building and furnishing the new facility. 

He did that, he said, “chiefly in consideration of 

the deep interest I feel in the cause of public 

education and with a view of promoting and 

advancing the growth and development thereof 

in the City of Kerrville.” 

Tivy conveyed the land to the city because it 

oversaw public education as well as the more 

traditional services of local government. After a 

false start because the first design submitted 

would cost more than the $8,000 the city had 

allocated for the project, construction began on a 

public school that opened its doors to students in 

early 1891. Named for the man who had given 

the land on which it was built, Tivy High School 

graduated its first class four years later. But Tivy 

had died on July 5, 1892, and was buried on 

Tivy Mountain. To this day, the senior class of Tivy 

High School keeps the Tivy Cemetery maintained. 


Among those attending the new school was 

young Chester William Nimitz, whose stepfather 

operated the St. Charles Hotel. He lived there 

with his family until he left Kerrville to attend 

the U.S. Naval Academy, where he graduated 

seventh in his class of 114 in 1905. Later, as 

admiral of the Pacific Fleet, he would play a 

crucial role in the Allied victory in World War II. 

With its new school and other amenities, 

by the mid-1890s, Kerrville had begun to take 

on the trappings of a modern late nineteenth 

century city. But even with rail service and 

public utilities, it remained a relatively remote 

community, still more town than city. At the 

meat market August Henke operated on Water 

Street, he kept a pet bear as a living reminder of 

the not-too-far-distant day when bruins roamed 

the Hill Country. 

One day in 1895, the bear got loose. First he 

barged into an insurance office on Earl Garrett 

Street, scattering customers and staff. Then the 

animal ran into the front yard of the Schreiner 

house, startling the captain’s son Louis and 

two of his brothers. Seeing the animal, several 

Italian stone masons who had been doing 

some work at the mansion found they also 

were skilled tree climbers. Uninterested in 

molesting them, the bear continued through 

the Schreiner’s back yard and went in the rear 

entrance of Schreiner Merchandise. 

Hearing all the commotion, blacksmith John 

Grider grabbed a rifle and strode across the 

street to confront the bear. Blasting away at the 

hapless animal, he put bullet holes through at 

least six pair of shoes on display in the store 

before finally ending the bear’s short-lived shot 

at returning to the wild. 


❖ 

Above: A mountain-top view of 

Kerrville in 1903. 



Bottom, left: Newspaper editor 

J. E. Grinstead published a booklet 

touting Kerrville in 1905. 


Bottom, right: The San Antonio & 

Aransas Pass Railway brought 

“excursionists” to Kerrville for its 

“mountain scenery”. 


Sheep could be sheared and cattle shipped 

to market, but the railroad brought a new 

“commodity” that did not have to be watered or 

fed unless they paid for it themselves—tourists. 

In the summer, the SAAP advertised special 

excursion rates to entice passengers to Kerrville 

to beat the heat. Beyond its scenery, in the days 

before air-conditioning, even the town’s modest 

1,645-feet elevation above sea level made it 

cooler at night than in San Antonio, Austin or 

more distant cities. Being farther to the west, 

it also generally had a lower relative humidity. 

Too, the cypress-shaded Guadalupe River offered 

no shortage of places to wade, swim or fish. 

John L. Pampell came to Kerrville in 1891 as 

an express messenger with the SAAP. 

“The town was a thriving village of about 

1,500 people,” he later recalled. “Captain 

Schreiner’s store, his residence, the St. Charles 

Hotel, and Dr. Parsons’ livery stable, with the 

dance hall above, were the chief buildings 

except the courthouse and the Union Church.” 


Leaving the employ of the railroad, Pampell 

opened an ice cream parlor and confectionary 

(as candy stores were then called) and by 

1899 had a thriving concern at the former 

Gregory Hotel on the corner of Water and 

Sidney Baker. Pampell had his business, which 

eventually he expanded into a drug store, on 

the first floor with the second floor serving as 

the town’s auditorium. Later, he put a brick 

façade over the building, which still stands. 

Not all of those who traveled by rail to 

Kerrville came to open businesses or to enjoy 

the area’s recreational possibilities. Back 

when doctors believed a higher, dryer climate 

benefited tuberculars, the town gained new 

residents who moved there for their health. 

“The wonderful salubrity of the climate of 

Kerr County has long been known,” the 

husband of one of those health-seekers later 

wrote. “When Kerrville was but a little village, 

isolated from the…world, her fame travelled 

afar and many came in quest of health.” 

The author of that passage was James E. 

Grinstead, a Missouri-born itinerant journalist 

who moved to Kerrville from Indian Territory 

(now Oklahoma) hoping an increase in 

elevation above sea level and corresponding 

decrease in relative humidity would help his 

wife Sarah’s lung troubles. The Grinsteads hit 

town in 1899, but if the change in geography 

helped Mrs. Grinstead, it did not do so for long. 

She died that December, only twenty-seven 

years old. 

While he could have been forgiven for 

moving on to start a new life, Grinstead 

remained. Within a year, he had remarried, 

this time to a young widow who operated a 

Kerrville boarding house. He had purchased the 

Kerrville News, renamed it the Kerrville Mountain 

Sun and was giving the town’s other sheet, 

the Kerrville Times, stout competition. Elected 

mayor in 1902, he served a two-year term and 

then gained election to the local school board. 

In 1905, he published a thirty-two page 

booklet, “Kerrville and Kerr County, Texas,” that 

went a long way toward helping the community 

further develop its reputation as a great place to 

visit and perhaps stay. But Grinstead, and most 

of the rest of the business community, did not 

want too much growth. 

“The city of Kerrville seeks no ‘boom,’” he 

wrote, “but rather a continuation of that steady 

growth that has characterized her progress since 

the first settler built his humble cabin on the 

river bank and the painted savage stood on our 

mountain tops and with hand to brow looked 

with awed surprise upon the usurper of his 

hunting ground.” 

❖ 

Above: The Guadalupe River around 

Kerrville has been a popular fishing 

destination for generations. 



Below: J. E. Grinstead. 


❖ 

Above: For a time in the early 

twentieth century, Kerrville hosted 

the annual West Texas Fair at this 

long-vanished park. 


Right: Freight wagons laden with 

wool and mohair lumbered in and out 

of Kerrville well into the 

twentieth century. 



Below: A postcard view of Kerrville 

around 1910. 



To avoid creating “erroneous impressions of 

the merits and resources” of the community, 

the newspaper editor continued, “we have been 

conservative in every statement.” 

That said, he still went on to refer to 

Kerrville as “The Gem City of the Guadalupe.” 

Reflecting the racial prejudices of the times, 

Grinstead noted the population was 2,000, 

“with a very great preponderance of white 

citizens, there being but few negroes in 

the city.” 

Then, putting on his former mayor’s hat, he 

quickly noted that Kerrville had “many modern 

public utilities not found in towns of much 

greater population,” including tax-paid streets 

(as opposed to streets maintained by publically 

summoned citizens) and an excellent water 

supply from the Guadalupe River, water from 

its headwater springs “pure and lipid as the 

wells about Jericho.” The Kerrville Water Works 

Company had begun operation in 1894, 

followed two years later with the arrival of 

telephone service. With a hundred subscribers, 

by the time Grinstead published his booklet, 

Kerrville had telephone connections to “all 

neighboring county seats” as well as longdistance 

service all the way to San Antonio. 

C. C. and Florence Butt came to Kerrville, 

like many others, for C. C.’s health. The 

relocation proved too late to help him, but it 

would have an enormous impact on Texas. On 

November 26, 1905, Mrs. Butt opened a small 

grocery on the first floor of their residence. 

She ran it until 1919, when her youngest son, 

Howard Edward Butt, came home from World 

War I. He soon took over operation of the 

business, opening new stores in Del Rio and 

Laredo. That marked the beginning of retail 

giant HEB, which by 2015 operated more than 

300 grocery stores in 150 Texas communities. 

The corporation has its headquarters in San 

Antonio, but it all began in Kerrville. 

❖ 

Girls Day Out early 1900s style. 




❖ 

Right: Kerrville phone service cost all 

of $1.75 a month in 1920. 


Below: Money changed hands in the 

1920s with as little as a telephone call 

and a handwritten message, as this 

document demonstrates. 


Opposite, top: The 23rd Infantry 

Division, stationed at Fort Sam 

Houston in San Antonio after service 

in France during World War I, passes 

through Kerrville on maneuvers. 



Opposite, bottom: By the 1920s, 

trucks had begun to replace freight 

wagons in hauling wool and mohair 

into town for storage and eventual 

sale at Charles Schreiner’s 

wool warehouse. 



By 1909, automobiles were beginning to 

replace horses in Kerrville and elsewhere across 

Texas and the nation. “Less than two months 

ago,” Grinstead wrote that September, “there 

were but two automobiles in Kerr County. 

Now, there are eight machines owned here.” 

Observing “there seems to be an automobile 

craze in Kerrville and surrounding territory,” 

he noted the planned opening of the town’s 

first car dealership and an “automobile livery 

business.” Three years later, the city began 

paving the major streets in town. 

But with only wagon roads connecting 

Kerrville to the rest of Texas, the railroad 

continued to be the primary way people 

traveled from there to other cities. The original 

SAAP depot burned down in 1913, replaced 

two years later by a brick structure that 

still stands. 

Crowding 80, in 1917 Captain Schreiner 

decided he ought to retire. Having accumulated 

some $6 million since settling in Kerr County, 

he divided his numerous businesses among 

his six sons and began concentrating on 

philanthropy. He donated funds for roadbuilding 

projects, a high school in Junction, 

and high school scholarships. Most of his efforts 

benefited the Kerrville area, but he also helped 

pay for improvements to a church in his home 

community in Alsace-Lorraine. 



❖ 

Above: Aerial view of the Veterans 

Administration Hospital complex. 


Right: Veterans Administration nurses 

had their own quarters adjacent to the 

government hospital. 


Below: Veterans Administration 

Hospital stands on land donated by 

the Schreiner family. 



In 1923, four years before his death, the 

captain donated $100,000 and 140 acres along 

the Guadalupe for development of a military 

prep school for boys and two-year college. 

Operated by the Presbyterian Church, the 

new Schreiner Institute honored the name of 

its benefactor. 

The same year Schreiner Institute opened, a 

healthcare facility for military veterans called 

Legion Hospital started accepting patients. 

Operated initially by the Texas American 

Legion, the hospital was the forerunner of the 

large Veterans Administration Hospital that 

would be built after the next world war. The 

plan had been to build the facility on a tract 

on the Junction highway later occupied by the 

Inn of the Hills. But the Schreiners felt that site 

was a poor choice. The area the family thought 

would be best was a 700-acre tract belonging 

to Potter Brown, one of pioneer settler Joshua 

Brown’s sons. The younger Brown agreed to sell 

the land to the Schreiners for $40,000, and they 

in turn donated the acreage for the hospital. 

A year after the Shriner Institute opened its 

doors to young men, University of Texas football 

coach E. J. “Doc” Stewart founded Camp Stewart, 

the beginning of the summer camp business in 

the Kerrville area. While Camp Stewart was for 

boys, two years later Camp Mystic opened for 

girls. Over the coming years, more and more 

summer camps would follow as Kerrville’s 

reputation as a resort area grew. 

Trains continued to carry visitors to Kerrville, 

but in the early 1920s, the Sunset Limited 

Bus Line—using buses built by Buick at 

Loudenville, Ohio—began operating between 

Kerrville and San Antonio. In 1929, the 

transportation company became Kerrville Bus 

Company, which at the height of its operations 

literally sent the name “Kerrville” rolling all 

across the Southwest. 

In summer of 1926, the owner of an 

automobile dealership in San Antonio furnished 

a brand new Locomobile Junior 8 so that 

the San Antonio Express could send a reporter 

and photographer and others to describe the 

sights to see along a 174-mile loop that 

extended through Kerrville. The road from 

San Antonio to Kerrville was only paved as far 

as Boerne, with another stretch just beyond 

❖ 

Above: Downtown Kerrville in the 

early 1920s. 



Below: Founded in the 1920s, 

Kerrville Bus Company carried 

the name “Kerrville” across 

the Southwest. 



❖ 

Above: Built adjacent to the Schreiner 

Mansion, the art deco downtown 

post office has since been converted 

into a cultural center. 


Below: The Arcadia Theatre, once 

considered the finest movie house 

between San Antonio and El Paso, 

started showing films in 1926. 



Kerrville, but was still a “good hard-surfaced 

road.” Getting eighteen miles to the gallon, the 

newspaper excursionists thoroughly enjoyed 

their day. 

“For those motorists…who have never made 

this trip,” the newspaper said, “it is highly 

recommended as a cure for that tired feeling, 

while the invigorating atmosphere of the higher 

altitude imparts fresh vigor to the body and 

mind. This visiting motorist will find much 

to…admire.” 

The same year the San Antonio daily touted 

Kerrville as a travel destination, construction 

began on the five-story Bluebonnet Hotel, the 


city’s first high-rise structure. The new hotel 

rose at the intersection of Earl Garrett and 

Water Streets, former site of the Kerr Fire 

Department. (Three additional floors would 

be added to the building in 1936.) 

Opened on April 2, 1927, the hotel had 

a Mediterranean architectural flavor, with 

stuccoed exterior walls and red tile roof. 

“The new hostelery added metropolitan 

atmosphere,” the Kerrville Mountain Sun boasted. 

Financed by the Schreiner family, the 

Bluebonnet quickly became the social center 

of Kerrville. In addition to providing visitors 

with rooms overlooking the Guadalupe River 

or the city’s surrounding hills, the Bluebonnet 

hosted banquets, weddings, and all the 

community’s civic clubs. The hotel’s 

restaurant or coffee shop saw many a 

handshake deal among ranchers and 

area businessmen. 

In addition to a new hotel, with the 

opening of the Arcadia Theatre on Water 

Street on June 29, 1926, Kerrville 

residents could boast that their town 

had the largest movie house in 

West Texas. Not only that, it had airconditioning. 

With a roomy balcony 

that customers paid extra for, the 

Arcadia could seat 1,000. Opening 

night, a packed house enjoyed seeing 

Colleen Moore in the silent film Irene 

with Mrs. J. S. Colley playing the 

theater’s large pipe organ to provide 

background music The theater’s large stage, 

which could handle as many as a dozen 

performers, accommodated visiting vaudeville 

troupes and notable entertainers, including 

Will Rogers. 

The good times waned three years later 

following the 1929 stock market crash. At first, 

the chaos on Wall Street did not mean much 

to the average person, but the financial collapse 

had a domino effect on the nation’s and 

eventually, the world’s economy. Kerrville and 

the rest of the nation became mired in what 

came to be called the Great Depression, the 

latter word descriptive not only of the economy, 

but of the mindset of many. 

❖ 

Above: Funded by Captain 

Charles Schreiner and built on land 

he donated, Schreiner College 

(now Schreiner University) 

opened in 1924. 


Below: Opening in 1926, the 

Bluebonnet Hotel became Kerrville’s 

first high-rise. 



❖ 

Kerrville’s worst-ever flood hit the 

town hard in the summer of 1932. 


Adding to Kerrville’s woes the hundred-year 

flood of July 2, 1932 sent the Guadalupe River 

on a rampage. Water rose to the back of the 

Bluebonnet Hotel, but spared the heart of 

town. Even so, the lower parts of town saw 

extensive damage. 

Since 1918, Captain Schreiner’s son Louis 

had been in charge of the bank that bore 

the family’s name. The family and the bank 

stayed solvent throughout the Depression, with 

Schreiner urging area ranchers to stick to their 

land and ride it out. Most did just that. The 

City of Kerrville thought ahead, as well. In 

1934, it donated 517 acres along the Guadalupe 

River for use as a state park. The Civilian 

Conservation Corps set up a camp there and 

constructed an entrance, park road, a caretaker’s 

residence and other infrastructure. The park 

opened in 1937. Sixty-seven years later, the 

state returned the land to the city and the 

acreage became Kerrville-Schreiner Park. 

During World War II, Louis Schreiner 

donated land between Kerrville and Ingram for 

a Navy air training field, named in his honor. 

Student pilots began training there in February 

1943. Meanwhile, scores of young men and 

women signed up to serve in the armed forces. 

When the war ended and the military 

declared the facility surplus, Kerrville opened 

its own airport at a new location east of town. 

For a time, Trans-Texas Airlines provided 

passenger service with two-engine DC-3s. 

Some came to Kerrville in their own airplanes, 

including Howard Hughes and World War I 

flying ace Eddy Rickenbacker, who had a ranch 

in the county. 

In addition to air passenger service, Kerrville 

soon had its first non-agricultural or tourismrelated 

industry. The Mooney brothers, Albert 

and Arthur, had started a small airplane 

manufacturing company in Wichita, Kansas, 

in 1929. It went bust a year later as the 

Depression set it, and the brothers hired on 

with other aviation companies. After the war, 

Albert resurrected the company and moved 

it to Kerrville, entering into partnership with 

investor Charles Yankey in 1946. Arthur 

Mooney soon joined the business and all went 

well until Yankey died in 1953. Within two 

years, the loss of their principal financial 

banker forced the brothers to sell the business. 

Manufacturing continued under a succession 

of owners, but each new owner retained the 

brand name. 

Texas began to grow rapidly after World War 

II, but despite its popularity as a destination, 

Kerrville continued to add population and 

amenities slowly. Residents and visitors alike 

still could find plenty of solitude in the hills 

along the Guadalupe. 


“Kerrville is a dead end for most of the Austin 

buses, as well as the sole rail service, a freight 

which toots with great éclat round the bend 

every noontide, and then, after the crews have 

had lunch, toots back to ‘San Anton,’” Emerson 

Stringham wrote in 1948. He went on to note 

what continues to be true, that San Antonio 

is the closest big city, “constituting Kerrville’s 

source of daily papers and everything else for 

which a village must depend upon a town…” 

In 1947, Stringham continued, that “village” 

covered more than 2.5 square miles, with some 

1,900 homes and 250 buildings. “The outline 

of the city bulges so as to collect itself some 

purlieus—an educational institute [Schreiner 

Institute], a golf course, and livestock pens.” 

❖ 

Above: Aerial view of Kerrville 

in 1947. 



Below: When Kerr County celebrated 

its centennial in 1956, the centennial 

committee office displayed relics 

ranging from vintage firearms to 

old furniture. 




❖ 

Above: Pampell’s Drugstore at 

Water and Sidney Baker Streets 

opened in 1898 and continued to 

cater to the necessities and sweettooth 

indulgences of Kerrville 

residents well into the 1980s. 



Below: Downtown in the 

early 1950s. 


Rail passenger service had opened the way 

for Kerrville’s development as a recreational 

destination, but by the late 1940s, most people 

traveled by car, bus or plane. The last passenger 

train pulled out of the depot in Kerrville in 

1947, though freight service continued. 

By most measures, in 1949 Kerrville remained 

a small town (with roughly only a population of 

7,500) when its residents got the benefit of a 

decidedly big city healthcare facility. That year, 

Sid Peterson Hospital opened for patient care 

at Sidney Baker and Water Street in the heart 

of downtown. The six-story, 88,000-square foot 

hospital accommodated 55 rooms along with 

state of the art surgical and treatment facilities. 

A decade before the facility opened, early day 

area rancher Sid Peterson—father of brothers 

Hal and Charlie Peterson—had died in a San 

Antonio hospital more than sixty miles from 

his home. The two sons told their family and 

acquaintances that they would see to it that 

Kerrville gained its own first-class hospital. It 

took ten years, but the Hal and Charlie Peterson 

Foundation got it done. 


❖ 

Left: Sid Peterson Hospital opened in 

1949 with a street-level gas station. 


Below: View of Sid Peterson Hospital 

from the Bluebonnet Hotel in 1956. 




❖ 

Top to bottom: Thanks to cheap gas 

and a robust post-war economy, 

“tourist courts” in Kerrville grew in 

popularity as patronage of traditional 

hotels declined in the 1950s. 



The first hospital in the nation to have an 

intercom system enabling patients to call for a 

nurse, it also was the first hospital built with 

central air conditioning. Unlike the harsh white 

walls of most hospitals, Kerrville’s new facility 

had soft colors ranging from pale green to a 

subdued terra cotta as well as a roof-top garden 

offering a healing view of the surrounding 

countryside and the Guadalupe River. 

The hospital’s business model was as 

innovative as its design: Part of Sid Peterson’s 

operating money would come from renting out 

much of the buildings first three floors for 

commercial usage, including doctor’s offices, an 

attorney, a tire and appliance store, a beauty 

parlor, the Kerrville Bus Company and even 

a service station. Time Magazine ran an article 

on the hospital along with other publications. 

declared, “Kerr County will build a park in a 

day,” 2,000 local volunteers from Boy Scouts 

to cowboys turned out at 7 a.m. on April 26, 

1950, to make that happen. By 7 p.m., they had 

cleared the wooded bottomland, graded a road 

and completed picnic tables, a stage for openair 

performances, a playground and a miniature 

golf course. The park now covers 506 acres. 

In 1954, with $250 in capital, James Avery 

started a custom jewelry business in the twocar 

garage of his mother-in-law at the time. 

Even its first year, Avery made money followed 

by more money the second year. In 1957, 

he put out his first catalog and hired his 

first employee. The operation outgrew its first 

home, and would continue to expand with 

more workers, a wider variety of inventory, 

increased production and ever-rising sales. 

“There are larger hospitals,” Hal Peterson 

told the Houston Chronicle in 1950, “but there 

is no finer one in any other Texas city. That’s 

not bragging, that’s stating the facts.” 

The same year, with Peterson again the 

driving force, Kerrville gained national news 

media attention when the town built a large 

new park in only twelve hours. Earlier that 

year, Robert and Louise Hays of Houston 

donated 35 acres along the Guadalupe across 

from downtown. After Peterson famously 

Counting babies born at the new hospital, 

and folks who moved there from elsewhere, 

by 1960 Kerrville had 8,901 residents. First 

Lady Claudia Taylor (Ladybird) Johnson came 

to Kerrville in the fall of 1967 for the opening 

of a new 22,000-plus-square-foot library overlooking 

the Guadalupe River at 505 Water 

Street. Built of limestone with ample use of 

glass to take advantage of the setting, the threefloor 

Butt-Holdsworth Memorial Library holds 

more than 50,000 volumes. 

❖ 

During the 1960s Charlie Schreiner III 

helped reestablish longhorn cattle in 

Texas, building a herd on the 

Y.O. Ranch, the Kerr County ranch 

his grandfather founded in 1880. 

PHOTO BY L. A. WILKE. 


❖ 

Guests staying at the Bluebonnet 

Hotel did not have far to walk to 

enjoy Kerrville’s municipal 

swimming pool. 



The same year the new library opened, the 

high school building at 1009 Barnett Street in 

use since 1891 was closed and a new Tivy High 

School facility began educating local teens. 

The old school was later restored and became 

the administration building for the Kerrville 

Independent School District. 

Throughout the 1960s, Kerrville remained 

primarily a destination, not a way point for 

travelers. That changed in 1969, with the 

completion of Interstate 10 through the 

hills just north of town. Stretching from 

Jacksonville, Florida, to San Diego, California, 

and covering 881 miles across Texas, the super 

highway made it easier for the rest of the nation 

to see what Kerrville had to offer, provided 

they bothered to take the Kerrville exit as they 

whooshed by. 

As singer Bob Dylan lyrically observed in 

1964, “the times they are a changing.” 

In 1971, military training ceased at Schreiner 

College. That same year, the college admitted 

female students for the first time. Two years later 

the school dropped its high school program, 

focusing on college-level curricula only and 

in 1981, Schreiner College (now Schreiner 

University) became a four-year liberal arts school. 

With the venerable Bluebonnet Hotel beginning 

to wilt businesswise, the Kerrville skyline 

would soon change with the times. Most 

motorists stopping for the night had no interest 

in parking in a garage and having a bellhop 

carry their luggage to an upstairs room when 

they could park right outside their room at a 

motel with a swimming pool. The Bluebonnet 

Hotel had been in decline for some time, and 

in 1971 Schreiner Bank purchased it with 

plans to tear it down to make room for a bank 

expansion and more parking space. That fall, 

the old hotel fell before a 2,000-pound wrecking 

ball. Fittingly, many of its bathtubs were 

sold for use as water troughs on area ranches. 

Travel habits were not the only things 

changing in the 1970s. At the height of its 

popularity, the Bluebonnet had hosted Big 

Band ensembles, but by the 1970s, rock and 

roll, country music or a combination of both 

styles held sway. 


In 1972 Rod Kennedy, a New Yorker who 

came to Texas in the late 1940s when his 

mother got a job in Houston, had an idea that 

would result in hundreds of thousands of 

visitors to Kerrville and national recognition for 

the community. 

Kennedy attended the University of Texas in 

Austin, and helped with the early development 

of KUT FM, a broadcast operation which would 

grow into a National Public Radio station. 

Looking to radio as a career, in the 1960s he 

purchased an Austin radio station licensed as 

KHFI and turned it into a jazz station. In a few 

years, he built the station into a combination 

AM-FM operation and then accomplished something 

most Central Texans thought impossible— 

he got a second television station on the air in 

Austin. What made that particularly notable 

was the fact that the Lyndon Johnson family 

owned the Capital City’s only broadcast station. 

Prior to then, any time someone tried to get 

a license to open another TV station in Austin, 

the application faded away in Washington like 

so much radio wave nighttime “skip.” 

Kennedy broadcast jazz and folk music on 

his radio station because he liked it. In the late 

’60s, his appreciation of both genres led to his 

opening a music house in Austin. None of this 

had any particular impact on Kerrville, 100 

miles away. But in 1972, Kennedy decided to 

stage a folk music event in the Hill Country. 

The first gathering, which featured thirteen 

performers, drew 2,800 ticket-buyers. That was 

the beginning of the Kerrville Folk Festival, 

which grew into one of the nation’s largest 

annual music events. When the second festival 

brought in nearly twice the number of people 

who had attended the first year, Kennedy 

realized the event needed more space. Since 

Kerrville did not have a facility capable of 

handling larger crowds, Kennedy bought a 

sixty-acre tract nine miles south of town and 

named it Quiet Valley Ranch. 

Thanks to the interstate, the folk festival 

and continuing popularity as a recreational 

destination, by 1980 Kerrville’s population had 

nearly doubled in twenty years, increasing 

from 8,901 in the 1960 U.S. Census to 15,276 

in the 1980 national head count. The city broke 

the 20,000 mark in 2000, and in 2010 the 

population had risen to 25,000. 

To capitalize on the increased traffic through 

town brought by the interstate highway and 

Kerrville’s growing status as a tourist mecca 

(one of the attractions being his ranch), in 1984 

Charles Schreiner III opened the 200-room 

Y.O. Ranch Hotel only a few blocks south of 

the interstate. 

In the early 1980s, noted Southwestern 

architect O’Neil Ford was commissioned to 

design what would prove to be his last public 

project, a home for the Cowboy Artists of 

America Museum. Built of heavy timber and 

limestone, the 14,000-square foot museum 

is evocative of a fortified Mexican hacienda. 

Now known as the Museum of Western Art, 

❖ 

Founded in 1869, the Schreiner Store 

continues in business in the heart 

of Kerrville. 



❖ 

The 1950s-vintage municipal 

auditorium was transformed into a 

state-of-the-art center for the 

performing arts with a donation from 

the Cailloux Foundation. 


it opened April 23, 1983. The museum 

underwent an expansion in 2004 with the 

completion of the Masel S. Quinn Pavilion of 

the Western Art Academy and a year later 

with the addition of the Journey West 

Children’s Gallery. Located at 1550 Bandera 

Highway, the internationally known art 

museum draws thousands of visitors annually 

to Kerrville. 

The Kerrville Folk Festival, meanwhile, 

continued to grow in popularity through the 

1980s and 1990s. But when he turned 70, 

Kennedy felt it was time to slow down. He 

sold the festival and its much-expanded 

Kerrville-area infrastructure to a group of 

Dallas investors in the fall of 1999. A second 

change of ownership came in 2008, when the 

Texas Folk Music Foundation purchased the 

festival and its assets and converted it into a 

nonprofit organization. 

When Kennedy died in 2014 at 84, his old 

friend Peter Yarrow (of Peter, Paul and Mary 

fame) flew to Austin from New York to attend 

his funeral. In praising Kennedy, the folksinger 

also complimented Kerrville. “If I wanted to 

imagine the way the world could be,” he said, 

“I’d go to Kerrville.” 

Like many Baby Boomers (those born 

between 1946 and 1964), midway into the first 

decade of the twenty-first century it had become 

clear that Sid Peterson Hospital was getting long 

in the tooth. The hospital purchased a thirtyfive-acre 

tract at Cully Street and Hill Country 

Drive and began making plans to build a larger, 

state-of-the-art regional medical facility. 

Renamed Peterson Regional Medical Center, 

the 124-bed hospital opened in April 2008. 

Demolition of the old hospital and the sevenstory 

medical office building across from it 

began in the spring of 2010 and continued 

through that fall. A four-level parking garage for 

the benefit of downtown visitors soon rose 

where the Kerr Bus Company and Peterson Auto 

once stood. The new city hall and public plaza 

were then built on the site of the former medical 

building, transforming the look of downtown. 

The Schreiner name continues to loom 

large in Kerrville on public and commercial 

buildings, at the entrance of a large city park, 

a university, a golf course, an airport and street 

signs, but the family’s influence in Kerrville 

began to wane in the first decade of the 

twenty-first century. After 139 years, Schreiner’s 

Department Store closed in 2007 though it later 


esumed operation under a corporate owner 

not connected to the family. The storied Y.O. 

Ranch changed hands in 2015. 

But those who know their Kerrville history 

understand the enormous impact the Schreiners 

had on a community that arguably should have 

been renamed after the old captain. 

“He started out with $5, and by the time he 

died in 1927, he had $6 million and 600,000 

acres of land, and before that he gave 

$5 million back to the community,” Alice 

McDaniel of the Schreiner Mansion Museum 

told the San Antonio Express in 2007. “The town 

may not have been so prosperous if it wasn’t 

for him. He owned practically everything…at 

one time…the electric company, a bank, the 

telephone company, the store and Y.O. Ranch. 

And he helped bring the railroad into town 

in the late 1880s to make it the hub of the 

Hill Country.” 

Another family name important to modern 

Kerrville is Cailloux. A foundation created by 

Floyd and Kathleen Cailloux, who retired from 

Houston to the Hill Country, funded construction 

of the Peterson Plaza at Sidney Baker and Water 

Street after the old Sid Peterson Hospital and its 

adjoining medical office were razed. The Cailloux 

Foundation also funded the transformation of 

Kerrville’s 1950s-vintage municipal auditorium 

into the Kathleen C. Cailloux Theater (opened in 

2003), the renovation and reopening of what was 

once Schreiner Department Store as a ladies’ 

fashion store, and two home furnishing stores 

and the land for Kerrville’s new city hall. In July 

2015 the foundation also took over ownership 

and management of the Schreiner Mansion from 

Schreiner University. 

Kerrville’s role as a hub city has continued. 

For anyone driving from San Antonio to El Paso 

along Interstate 10, it is the largest city they 

will go through. It’s also the largest city in the 

five-county Hill Country region and, given 

that an additional 50,000 or so people live in 

various developments just outside Kerrville’s 

extra territorial jurisdiction, for all practical 

purposes Kerrville is three times as large as its 

population signs suggest. 

Old buildings fall to make room for new 

structures or amenities, civic leaders die, family 

dynasties crumble and memory fades, but the 

Guadalupe River still flows clear and cool 

through cypress trees, cedar-covered hills still 

surround the city, and people from all over still 

want to live in or visit Kerrville. 

❖ 

Kerrville’s new city hall stands where 

the old Sid Peterson Hospital used to 

be at Water and Sidney Baker Streets. 




SHARING THE HERITAGE 

❖ 

Inset: Unloading wool at Schreiner’s 

wool warehouse. 

Historic profiles of businesses, 

organizations, and families that have 

contributed to the development and 

economic base of Kerrville 

Catering of Central Texas, Inc. .........................................................44 

Mini Mart .....................................................................................46 

Wilson Asset Management, Inc. .........................................................48 

Sharing the Heritage ✦ 43

CATERING OF 

CENTRAL TEXAS, 

INC. 

❖ 

Above: Celebrating Hans’ induction 

into the Academy of Chefs, 1967. 

Below: The Folklore Dancers at the 

Inn of the Hills. 

A seed to the American dream was planted 

on October 16, 1959, when Hansueli (Hans) 

Schlunegger with wife Annemarie and infant 

son Ueli, having left their home of Switzerland, 

disembarked a DC 6 Swissair. Although Catering 

of Central Texas was merely a dream then, it 

nonetheless was the beginning of an American 

career that started at the Olympic Westin Hotel 

in Seattle where Hans was a young chef de partie. 

It was at his second job in America, at the newly 

inaugurated Glendale Country Club in Bellevue, 

Washington, that Chef Hans and Annemarie 

worked together for the first time—they proved 

to be a natural team. 

Moving to Houston in 1962, Hans worked as 

sous chef at the newly renovated Rice Hotel. On 

November 21, 1963, he orchestrated the dinner 

for John F. Kennedy and wife, Jacqueline the day 

before the tragic event in Dallas. A year later, 

Hans became executive chef at the country’s 

foremost hotel, the Warwick in Houston. He 

won several culinary awards, but his proudest 

triumph was leading the Texas Chefs’ team to 

victory in the Culinary Olympics in Miami. 

During his colorful career, Hans served the 

Duke and Duchess of Windsor and skating 

champion Sonja Henie, as well as many movie 

stars, including Phyllis Diller, Walter Matthau, 

and John Wayne (a picture with him and Wayne 

hangs in his office). 

In 1969, Hans and Annemarie moved to 

Kerrville to start an entrepreneurial career, when 

they leased the food and beverage operations 

of the Inn of the Hills Resort and the muchcelebrated 

Angora Club. A year later, Catering 

of Central Texas was incorporated. It also was 

the year when Hans, Annemarie, and Ueli took 

the oath of allegiance before a federal judge in 

San Antonio. The couple quickly built a long 

list of loyal clients. Hans credits their success 

to Annemarie. “Her exceptional hospitality 

skills are as natural as her beauty,” he said. 

“Annemarie has this unique gift for making 

our guests feel content and comfortable.” 

Greatly contributing to their success were their 

three children, Ueli, Marian, and Kurt, who 

started in the family business early on, standing 

on milk crates to reach the carving block and 

pasta skillets. 

When the Inn of the Hills sold in 1972, 

the Schluneggers moved to the other side of 

town and founded Annemarie’s Alpine Lodge 

Restaurant and Tick Tock Club at the Sunday 

House Inn, which they operated for twenty 

years. Their customers followed faithfully to 

the new location, and, under Annemarie’s guidance, 

the business flourished from day one. 

Hans’ favorite recollections are working with 

his three school-aged children early Sunday 

mornings, preparing for their renowned 

Champagne Brunch. While he prepared the 

shrimp creole, chicken a la king, prime rib 

roasts, and leg of lamb, Marian and Kurt brought 

up the salad table, including Russian eggs 

and their supremely popular twenty-four hour 

fruit salad. Ueli and a friend, Otto Huber, did 

the lavish desserts. “We were a wonderful team 

and spirits were flying high!” Hans would add. 

Within two years (1974), Catering of Central 

Texas was expanding. A new adventure, the 

Chalet Discotheque opened its doors across the 

street from Annemarie’s Alpine Lodge, and it 

was from the start an incredible success. People 

swarmed to the uniquely designed dance club 

from as far away as Junction, Austin, and 

San Antonio, and Wednesdays’ “Ladies Night” 

resembled a Texas stampede. This was followed 

quickly by their first lodging escapade, the 

Swiss Chalet Inn & Suites in Ruidoso, New 

Mexico, which spurred the addition of an 

airplane that Hans piloted himself. A Kerrville 

manufactured Mooney, of course. In 1976, they 

purchased two Motor Inns located in Fort 

Stockton and Pecos, Texas. “It’s a natural move,” 

he would justify, “it’s on the way to our lodge 

in New Mexico!” 


When the Inn of the Hills Resort became 

available for purchase in 1993, the Schlunegger 

family moved “back home” as longtime customers 

liked to say. Run down after years of 

neglect, the challenge of restoring the hotel’s 

infrastructure, gutting, and rebuilding many 

parts of it, was almost overwhelming. Soon, 

the sounds of backhoes and skill saws disturbed 

the tranquility around the junior Olympic-size 

swimming pool, the patios and cabanas, as hotel 

guests balanced on wooden planks across ditches 

and culverts to reach Chef Kurt’s good food 

and Marian’s superior service in the dining 

room. The awkward front desk was expanded, 

and twenty additional rooms soon crowned the 

cabana suits. In order to secure larger group 

bookings, a new state-of-the-art ballroom, 

seating up to 600 for banquets, was added 

under the watchful eyes of Ueli, who was now 

an architectural engineer. The hard work paid 

off—but so did the strain on Annemarie and 

Hans, who were well past retirement age. The 

family decided, with some regret, to list the Inn 

for sale, and eventually accepted an offer from 

1859 Historic Hotels who, they were confident, 

would maintain the integrity of their jewel. 

Today, Catering of Central Texas is still 

blooming. Ueli, now owner of EuroTex, a 

construction company specializing in inimitable 

designs, built in 2009 their 105 room 

Swiss Chalet Hotel & Suites in Pecos, Texas, 

adjacent to the Swiss Clock Inn that they have 

owned for forty years. The new, distinctively 

built hotel has brought out unique comments 

from its clientele: “A diamond in the desert,” as 

one guest put it, and “Are we truly in Pecos?” 

said others. With the new hotel, Ueli, Marian, 

and Kurt became equal participants of the 

company. What is in the young people’s future? 

Well, for one, they are planning a new four 

star hotel in neighboring Fredericksburg 

that Ueli’s EuroTex Company will build. “Why 

Fredericksburg?” The response is unanimous: 

“Because, for the near future, Kerrville has 

all the hotels it’ll need.” Of course, the last 

word has not been spoken, and the door to 

a Kerrville expansion stands wide open. 

“After all, it’s our hometown.” 

❖ 

Above: Ribbon cutting ceremony 

at the Swiss Chalet Hotel & Suites, 

May 2009. From left to right, 

Ueli and Marian Schlunegger; 

Dean Oates; Kurt, Annemarie and 

Hans Schlunegger. 


MINI MART 

❖ 

Right: Ann Fritz working in the 

meat market at the Fritz Grocery, 

Center Point, Texas, early 1960s. 

Below: The Mini Mart #6 in Comfort, 

Texas. Left to right, Junior and Ann 

Fritz, son David Fritz and daughter 

Sylvia Fritz Dobbs, 1997. 

The Mini Mart convenience stores that dot 

the Texas Hill Country in and around Kerrville 

represent the culmination of a dream that 

William J. Fritz, Jr.—better known as Junior— 

envisioned when he entered the grocery 

business more than half a century ago. 

Junior grew up in the Doss/Fredericksburg 

area and was introduced to the grocery business 

in 1949 when his parents began operating a 

grocery store/garage in Doss. In 1954 his 

parents moved to Center Point and leased a 

store at 5887 Highway 27, on the corner of 

Highway 27 and San Antonio Street. Within a 

year, they purchased Hoffman’s Grocery, located 

on the corner of China and San Antonio Street, 

and renamed it Fritz Grocery and Market. The 

store was a small market, selling fresh meats, 

produce, and canned goods. It only had a 

single hose gasoline pump in front of the store. 

Junior worked in the store before and after 

school, and even on his lunch break. When 

he was not learning the grocery business, 

he was hauling hay or working at other part 

time jobs. In between, he earned the rank of 

Eagle Scout. 

Junior graduated from Center Point High 

School in 1957 and married Ann in 1959. For a 

few years, he worked for a surveying crew with 

the Texas Highway Department in San Antonio. 

He also spent ninety days on active duty in the 

Air National Guard, and briefly sold insurance 

in Seguin. 

When his father died in 1960, Junior and 

Ann continued to help his mom with the 

grocery store. In 1966, they decided to move 

back to Center Point and purchase the store 

from his mother. Working together, the store 

prospered. It was during this time that Junior 

started ranching and farming, all the while 

thinking about how to expand his business. 

Soon, Junior learned about convenience 

stores and envisioned owning a chain of them. 

The first one came in 1973. He traded the 

Center Point property, Fritz Grocery, for a store 

in Kerrville, swapping stores with B. A. Hunter, 

who had built and dubbed his store “Mini 

Mart.” That transaction was the beginning 

of today’s Mini Mart, which now stretches 

from Bandera to Center Point, to Comfort, 

Fredericksburg, Ingram, and Kerrville. And 

during this time, the motto that Junior lived 

by was born: “Serving the Needs of the Texas 

Hill Country.” 


As he began to expand the Mini Mart brand, 

Junior leased the Center Point Store from 

Hunter and ran it alongside Ann until late 

1980. He started buying existing convenience 

stores and renaming them or building them 

from the ground up. Between 1973 and 1980, 

he added eight additional stores to the area. 

In 1992, his dream of bringing back Mini Mart 

to Center Point was realized. He purchased 

a store on Highway 27 and renamed it Mini 

Mart #4. That location became the fourteenth 

store in the growing chain. In 2003, he started 

a garbage collection company, Dumpster 

Dumpers, Inc., providing yet another service to 

the area. When he died in 2013, the Mini Mart 

chain had grown to seventeen locations. 

Today, Mini Mart employs over 135 people, 

and a typical store is 3,000 square feet. Each 

location sells a wide variety of products. You 

can purchase snacks, drinks, and groceries, and 

fill up your car at one of the numerous pumps 

that sell such branded gasolines as Shell, Valero, 

and Exxon. And, since Mini Mart has had two 

different $7.5 million winners, you may even 

be able to purchase a winning lottery ticket! 

Junior loved the Hill Country and the people 

who live here, and he enjoyed farming and 

ranching on his land. He especially enjoyed 

working with the Hill Country District Junior 

Livestock Association and sharing his love of 

land and stewardship with the next generation. 

Today his children, Sylvia and David, co-own 

and operate Mini Mart and Dumpster Dumpers, 

Inc. In 2014, they opened their first store 

without their father’s involvement, which served 

as a major milestone for them. This purchase 

brought the total number of locations to eighteen. 

Sylvia is married to Razor Dobbs and 

together they partnered in a company called 

BladeVision Films, which produces a hunting 

television show called Razor Dobbs Alive. 

David and his wife, Stacy, have a son, Gage, 

and a daughter, Lucy. It is possible that his 

children may become the fourth generation of 

Fritz family grocers. 

The family owned business will continue to 

fulfill Junior’s mission of serving the needs of 

the Texas Hill Country for generations to come. 

❖ 

Above: Our hometown store in 

Center Point, Texas, 2015. 

Below: Junior Fritz, owner and 

founder of Mini Mart, 2006. 


WILSON ASSET 

MANAGEMENT, 

INC. 

❖ 

Top, left: Ken Wilson. 

Top, right: Entrance to the 

Kerrville Camera Safari. 

Above: Lorraine Wilson. 

Bottom, left: Renovation work at 

Pampell’s Sports Bar & Grill. 

Bottom, right: Ken Wilson in 

his office. 

In 1986, Ken Wilson visited Kerrville and the 

Texas Hill Country six times in order to produce 

the first broadcast quality videos (now DVDs) of 

the exotic hunting industry titled Hunting the 

Exotics: Part One and Part Two. In doing so, he 

worked with several legendary pioneers of the 

industry including Thompson Temple of Texotic 

Wildlife and the Schreiner brothers, Louis, 

Charlie IV, Walter and Gus. He was assisted 

by famous guides Bo Wafford, Finn Aagaard, 

Thompson Temple, Lad Shunneson, and others. 

Those hunts and encouragement by Temple, led 

to Ken’s move from California to Kerrville 

in 1992 along with his wife, Lorraine and their 

children, Summer and Ryan (who later graduated 

from Tivy High School and the University of 

Texas and Texas State University, respectively). 

In 1992, Ken and his partner, Roger Haley, 

purchased 222 acres at the northeast corner 

of Interstate 10 and Highway 16 known as 

the Wilson-Haley Ranch. Assisted by some 

outstanding contractors, Ken spent six months 

improving the property and stocking it with 

thirty big game species and 300 animals. 

Kerrville Camera Safari, ably managed by Kathy 

Rice, was open every day from 1992 until sold 

for development in 1999. 

In 1994, Ken bought 227-231 East Garrett 

in historic downtown Kerrville from Jon 

Wolfmueller’s mother, Charlotte. He renovated 

the second floor and moved in his real estate 

companies, his worldwide hunt booking agency, 

and Sportsmen on Film, his video company. At 

the time, Sportsmen on Film had produced twentyfive 

broadcast quality titles on hunting, shooting, 

and adventure. Since his move to Kerrville, the 

company has produced an additional 45 titles 

on 6 continents including 11 countries in Africa 

and 7 in Asia. Ken’s office is decorated with 225 

big game mounts from his worldwide hunts. 

Ken’s real estate activities have resulted in 

several important renovations of historically 

significant properties: Pampell’s (arguably 

Kerrville’s most important historical commercial 

property), 227-231 Earl Garrett, 301-315 Earl 

Garrett, and 802-814 Main Street. The original 

HEB was located at the site of 806 Main Street, 

where the Hill Country Café has been located 

for the past seventy-three years. 

Not to be outdone, Lorraine, was the hostess 

of Kerrville’s first television talk show with 

co-host Jim Weathersbee, was a lead actress 

in several plays at Playhouse 2000, and is a 

past-president of the Texas Host Lions Club. 

Speaking of lions, for over twenty years, Ken has 

conducted sensory safaris involving the viewing 

and touching of big game mounts for the kids 

attending Kerrville’s famous Texas Lions Camp. 



ABOUT THE AUTHOR 

M IKE 

C OX 

Mike Cox, an elected member of the Texas Institute of Letters, is the 

author of more than a score of non-fiction books and hundreds of 

articles over the course of a career dating back more than forty years. 

In 2010 he received the A. C. Greene Lifetime Achievement Award 

and has earned numerous other recognitions for his writing over the 

years. His most noted work is a two-volume history of the legendary 

Texas Rangers, published in 2008-2009. A long-time newspaper 

writer turned state government spokesman, Cox lives in Austin. When 

not writing, he spends as much time as he can fishing and hunting 

or traveling and otherwise enjoying life in Texas. 


$19.95 

Historical Publishing Network 

ISBN: 978-1-944891-07-7

Historic Kerrville: The Story of Kerrville & Kerr County

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