Preslar-Hewitt Building

🏛️The era

Taylor grew up as a railroad town in the late nineteenth century, and its location on the Blackland Prairie made it a cotton town too. The prairie's deep, dark soils were some of the richest cotton land in Texas. The railroads that ran through Taylor carried that cotton to gins, compresses and distant markets, bringing money and people back with them.

By the early 1900s, towns like Taylor were busy commercial centers serving the farm country around them. Farmers came to town to sell crops, buy supplies, see doctors and lawyers, and shop. Main streets filled with sturdy brick buildings that showed the town's confidence in its future.

The year 1914, when this building went up, fell in a period when cotton and the railroads still ruled Central Texas. The automobile was beginning to change how people traveled, but the downtown business block remained the center of daily commercial life.

👥People & events

Hugo Hunke built this two-story commercial building in 1914, meant to anchor an important block in Taylor's business district. He planned it for flexibility, with ground-floor space for two businesses and as many as seven offices upstairs. That mix of storefronts below and professionals above was typical of a thriving small-city downtown.

The first tenants show what daily life looked like there. Strand Tailors made and fitted clothing at a time when many people still had garments made to measure. Menefee Grocery supplied kitchens in town and on nearby farms. Upstairs, offices gave space to the people who kept a market town's business running.

The building's best-remembered chapter came later. From 1929 to 1954 it housed the Preslar-Hewitt Pharmacy, which gave the building its name. Those years ran from the start of the Great Depression through World War II and into the postwar boom. Over that quarter century, the pharmacy would have been a steady presence downtown, a place where townspeople filled prescriptions and asked advice.

Over the decades the building served many other businesses as well, as one generation of downtown commerce gave way to the next.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

Across the country, railroads turned small stops into market towns, and those towns built main streets like Taylor's. Buildings such as the Preslar-Hewitt Building are what that era left behind: plain enough to be practical, with enough decoration to show local pride.

The neighborhood pharmacy had a special place in that world. Through the middle of the twentieth century, the druggist was a trusted figure in many American towns, and the drugstore was a regular stop on a trip downtown. A pharmacy that lasted 25 years in one building reflects how stable those small-town business districts once were.

The building's survival also connects to a wider national effort. Many downtowns across America lost historic buildings as shopping moved to highways and malls. Designating this one a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 2004 is part of a broad movement to save and reuse the commercial architecture that once defined American towns.

🧭If you visit

Take your time with the facade, because the details reward a close look. Find the pilasters, the flat columns set into the wall, and their decorative capitals at the top. Look for the transoms above the doors and windows, which once let daylight into the shops, and for the decorative tilework. Near the top, the entablature carries a dentil course, a row of small, tooth-like blocks borrowed from classical architecture.

Then step back and take in the whole block. The marker says Hunke meant this building to anchor it, and you can still read downtown Taylor as a cotton-and-railroad town that built in brick because it expected to last.

Taylor is an easy drive from Austin. It makes a rewarding stop for travelers exploring the small towns of the Blackland Prairie, where downtowns built on cotton money still line the old rail routes. A walk around the business district turns this single building into part of a larger historic streetscape.