Masonic Building
Kerrville, Kerr County, Texas
Marker Inscription
This locally quarried limestone building is a good example of late Italianate-style architecture. The façade features rough and smooth-dressed stone, arched windows and doorways, stone quoins and a projecting pressed metal cornice. Charles Schreiner formed the Kerrville Masonic Company in 1890, and Kerrville Lodge No. 697 A.F. & A.M. met here on the second story until 1927, when they moved to Schreiner's former house and rented this space to the Odd Fellows. The ground floor has housed the local post office, C.C. Butt Grocery and Texas Power and Light. The property remained in the Schreiner family until 1959.Recorded Texas Historic Landmark-2008
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Built of locally quarried limestone, this late Italianate building went up after Charles Schreiner formed the Kerrville Masonic Company in 1890, its façade dressed with arched openings, stone quoins, and a pressed-metal cornice. Kerrville Lodge No. 697 met on the second floor until 1927, when it moved out and leased the space to the Odd Fellows. The ground floor served the town in turn as post office, C.C. Butt Grocery, and Texas Power and Light, and the property stayed in the Schreiner family until 1959.
Why it matters
The building illustrates how fraternal orders and pioneer merchants like Charles Schreiner anchored the commercial and civic life of Texas Hill Country towns.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
By 1890 Kerrville was coming into its own as a hub of the Texas Hill Country, that region of limestone hills, clear rivers, and cedar breaks northwest of San Antonio. Towns like it grew on wool and mohair, on ranching and freighting, and on the merchants who tied the surrounding country to the wider world. As they prospered, they wanted buildings that looked the part.
This limestone building is a product of that ambition. Quarried locally and finished in the late Italianate style, it wears the confident dress of a Gilded Age commercial block: a façade of rough and smooth-dressed stone, arched windows and doorways, stone quoins at the corners, and a projecting pressed-metal cornice along the top.
That blend of local material and fashionable design tells you a great deal about the era. The stone came out of the Hill Country itself, but the style came from the pattern books and tastes of a nation then building Main Streets from coast to coast.
People & events
The building is bound up with Charles Schreiner, one of the towering figures of Kerrville's commercial life, who formed the Kerrville Masonic Company in 1890. Fraternal orders like the Masons were far more than social clubs in a nineteenth-century town; they were pillars of civic life, and a lodge building on a main street signaled that a community had arrived.
Kerrville Lodge No. 697, A.F. & A.M., met on the second story until 1927. In that year the Masons moved into Schreiner's former house and rented this space to the Odd Fellows — another of the great fraternal brotherhoods — so that the upper floor simply passed from one lodge to the next without ever losing its purpose.
Meanwhile the ground floor did the everyday work of a downtown. Over the years it housed the local post office, the C.C. Butt Grocery, and the offices of Texas Power and Light — the mail, the groceries, and the electricity of a growing town, all under one roof at different times. The property stayed in the Schreiner family until 1959, a span of nearly seventy years that tied the building to one of the region's founding commercial dynasties.
Its place in the American story
Buildings like this one are the connective tissue of American town life. The upstairs-lodge, downstairs-commerce arrangement was repeated on Main Streets across the country: fraternal orders held the top floor for ritual and fellowship while merchants and public services filled the storefronts below. In the decades before modern social insurance, lodges such as the Masons and the Odd Fellows also offered mutual aid and a sense of belonging, which is why their halls were built to last and to impress.
The roster of tenants on the ground floor is a small history of how towns worked. A post office knit the community to the nation's mail; a grocery fed it; an electric utility, arriving later, wired it into the twentieth century. The ordinary business of American life passed through this one address.
And the long Schreiner ownership reflects a familiar pattern in Western towns, where a single enterprising family or merchant could anchor the economy of a whole district for generations. This building is a durable monument to that kind of local leadership.
If you visit
Stand across the street first and read the façade like a page. The pressed-metal cornice, the stone quoins marking the corners, and the arched windows and doorways are the signatures of the late Italianate style, and the mix of rough and smooth-dressed limestone shows off stone pulled from the Hill Country itself. It is a building meant to be looked at.
Then let your imagination fill the two floors with their layered past: a fraternal lodge room upstairs where Masons, and later Odd Fellows, gathered behind those arched second-story windows, and a ground floor that was by turns a post office, a grocery, and an electric company's offices. Few small-town buildings pack so many chapters into one shell.
It makes a rewarding stop on a stroll through historic Kerrville and a fine introduction to the Hill Country's built heritage. Notice how it sits among its neighbors, and you begin to see how a single well-made stone building could anchor the commercial and civic life of a Texas town for the better part of a century.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Charles Schreiner
Themes & tags
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