HistoricSiteMarkers
Reconstruction & Gilded Age

Old Huffmeyer Store

Bandera, Bandera County, Texas

Marker Inscription

Built 1873 for E. Huffmeyer & brother, by B.F. Langford, Sr., contractor; of native stone. Bandera's oldest building. Used over 30 years by W.J. Davenport, Sr., as general store. Damaged by fire, 1936. Restored and remodeled by Thomas F. Boyle. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark, 1967.

Erected by Texas Historical Commission

The Story

Raised of native stone in 1873 by contractor B. F. Langford, Sr., this building is the oldest in Bandera, a Hill Country town settled largely by Polish and German immigrants. For more than thirty years W. J. Davenport ran it as a general store — the kind of frontier establishment that doubled as a town's economic and social center. Fire damaged it in 1936, but it was restored soon after.

Why it matters

The general store was the commercial heartbeat of a frontier settlement, and Bandera's oldest surviving building preserves that early chapter of Hill Country life.

Own a business near here? Add it to the map.

Themes & tags

Westward ExpansionIndustry & InventionFrontier HistoryLandmark

Nearby & related markers

Mormon Settlers in Bandera County

Bandera, TX

In March 1854 a band of Latter-day Saints led by church elder Lyman Wight settled near the year-old town of Bandera on the Medina River. Wight had broken with Brigham Young and brought a colony of 250 to Texas in 1846, moving from Austin to Fredericksburg—where they ran grist and saw mills—before founding "Mormon Camp." Here they raised houses with gardens between them, milled grain, and crafted native-wood furniture to sell back East. When Wight died in 1858 the colony scattered, though a remnant stayed on in Bandera.

Woolls Building

Center Point, TX

Built of limestone in 1873–75 by stonemason Sam H. Wellborn, the Woolls Building housed George W. Woolls's mercantile business and is one of Center Point's oldest surviving commercial structures. Its full-width balcony and exterior staircase led to an upper floor where fraternal groups gathered, including a Masonic lodge that counted several Texas Rangers among its members. For most of its life the ground floor kept up the town's retail trade.

George Wilkins Kendall

Boerne, TX

A New Hampshire native and journalist by trade, George Wilkins Kendall co-founded the New Orleans Picayune in 1837 and won fame writing vivid accounts of the 1841 Texan Santa Fe Expedition and the Mexican War—work that helped pioneer American war correspondence. In 1857 he settled in the Texas Hill Country and turned sheep rancher, promoting the region so energetically that the county was named for him in 1862. He lived out his days here until his death in 1867.

Early Settlers of Kerr County

Kerrville, TX

Kentucky-born Joshua D. Brown came to Texas in 1830, did military duty for the Republic, and in 1846 led ten shingle makers to the cypress-rich headwaters of the Guadalupe, building a camp of picket houses to hand-rive shingles despite the danger of Indian raids. His shingle trade was the first industry on the site of Kerrville; Brown bought 2,640 acres, donated the townsite, and insisted the county be named for his friend, surveyor James Kerr.