Hart House
Lampasas, Lampasas County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Built soon after Civil War. At first was 2-room, 2-story stagecoach stand and hotel. During 1870's was enlarged twice, to board visitors of the local health resort. Also has been a tannery, and has survived two floods of Sulphur Creek. (1966)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Raised just after the Civil War, this building began as a two-room, two-story stagecoach stand and hotel — a waypoint for travelers on the road. As Lampasas boomed as a health resort in the 1870s, it was enlarged twice to lodge visitors drawn by the local mineral springs. Over its long life it also served as a tannery and weathered two floods of Sulphur Creek.
Why it matters
Stagecoach stands and resort hotels tell the story of how central Texas towns marketed their mineral springs and drew the travelers who fueled their growth.
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Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Lampasas County
Lampasas, TX
Lampasas County was organized in 1856, formed from Travis and Bell counties as Anglo settlement pushed up the Texas rivers in the years before the Civil War. Its name derives from Lampazos, the Spanish name for the local river, said to refer to the cockle-burs that grew thickly along its banks. First settled around 1850, the county grew steadily and gained its first railroad in 1882, with the town of Lampasas as its seat.
Lampasas County Courthouse
Lampasas, TX
After the legislature created Lampasas County in 1856, business shuffled through borrowed rooms until the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railroad reached the county seat in 1882 and touched off a boom. The commissioners hired Waco architect Wesley Clark Dodson, whose Second Empire and Italianate design — crowned by a clock tower and mansard roof — was completed in 1884 with a Seth Thomas clock installed the same year. Floods in 1936 and 1957 damaged but never displaced the stately building.
Keystone Hotel
Lampasas, TX
Built in 1870 of native rock hauled to the site by oxen, the Keystone Hotel served as a stagecoach inn on the routes crossing early Central Texas, its windows crowned by the keystone arches that gave it its name. Kept by J. L. N. Gracy, it stood amid the ordinary infrastructure of frontier travel — a wagon yard, a bell tower, quarters for employees, and, poignantly, the grave of a boy killed in an Indian raid. It survives as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark.
Little Hotel
Lampasas, TX
When the nearby Gracy Hotel was finished in 1870, its builders used the leftover stone to raise this smaller companion, the "Little Hotel." It gave J. L. N. Gracy and his bride a private apartment upstairs while offering rooms to travelers below. Its mason, Charles Green, also worked on the larger hotel and on the Coleman County courthouse and jail, leaving his craftsmanship across the region.