Woolls Building
Center Point, Kerr County, Texas
Marker Inscription
One of Center Point's oldest existing commercial structures, the Woolls Building was constructed in 1873-75 to house the mercantile business of George W. Woolls (d. 1876). Local contractor and stonemason Sam H. Wellborn built it of limestone with a full-width balcony and exterior staircase. For most of its history, the first floor of the Woolls Building housed retail businesses, with fraternal organizations meeting on the upper story. The Rising Star Masonic Lodge, which included a number of Texas Rangers among its membership, met here from 1875 until 1900. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 2001
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
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.
Why it matters
It preserves the commercial and social heart of a nineteenth-century Hill Country town, down to the Rangers who met upstairs.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the years just after the Civil War, the Texas Hill Country was still very much a frontier. The land around Center Point, in Kerr County, was rugged and beautiful — cedar-covered hills, clear rivers, and long distances between neighbors. Settlers here made their living from the land: raising sheep and goats, herding cattle, farming what the thin soil would allow. A town in this country lived or died by whether it had a place to buy and sell.
This was the era historians call Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, a stretch of decades when the nation was knitting itself back together and pushing steadily westward. Railroads, mercantile stores, and small brick-and-stone downtowns were the visible signs of that push. When a community could raise a permanent commercial building — not a shack or a tent, but something built to last — it was a statement that the town intended to stay.
That is exactly what happened in Center Point in the early 1870s. A durable stone building going up on the main street meant the settlement had turned a corner from raw camp to real town, a place with commerce, order, and ambitions for the future.
People & events
The building carries the name of George W. Woolls, a merchant who set out to house his mercantile business under a solid roof. A general store in a frontier town was far more than a shop — it was where families stocked flour and coffee, traded for tools, picked up mail and news, and caught up on who was passing through. Woolls did not have long to enjoy his enterprise; he died in 1876, only a year or so after the building was finished.
The man who gave the structure its lasting form was Sam H. Wellborn, a local contractor and stonemason. Working in limestone — the honest, abundant stone of the Hill Country — he raised the walls between 1873 and 1875 and crowned the front with a full-width balcony reached by an exterior staircase. That balcony and outside stair were not just decoration; they let the upper floor lead its own life, separate from the store below.
And it did. For a quarter-century, from 1875 to 1900, the Rising Star Masonic Lodge gathered on that upper story. Among its members were a number of Texas Rangers — the frontier lawmen whose name is woven through the story of nineteenth-century Texas. Picture them climbing that outside staircase in the evening while, below, the town's daily trade went on.
Its place in the American story
Every American town of this era had a building like this, or wished it did: the general store on the ground floor and the meeting hall above. It is one of the most characteristic patterns in the nation's small-town history — commerce and community life stacked under a single roof, the economic engine below and the social heart upstairs.
The fraternal lodge was a huge part of that social heart. In the decades after the Civil War, organizations like the Masons spread across the country, offering fellowship, ritual, mutual aid, and a sense of belonging in scattered communities that had few other institutions. A lodge room over a store was a fixture from New England to the Texas frontier.
What makes this particular building resonate is the company that met upstairs. The Texas Rangers belong to the larger American story of law, order, and myth on the western frontier. To know that some of them once gathered in an ordinary stone building over a country store is a reminder that legendary figures lived ordinary community lives — buying goods, joining lodges, and shaping the towns they helped protect.
If you visit
Come to Center Point and look for one of the oldest commercial buildings still standing in town. The first thing to take in is the material: limestone, cut and laid by hand more than a century and a half ago. Stone like this weathers into a soft, warm color, and it tells you the builders meant this place to outlast them. It did.
Let your eye travel up to the full-width balcony and find the exterior staircase. That stair is the key to the whole building's story — it was the private path to the upper floor, the route the lodge members took to their meetings while shoppers came and went below. Standing at the bottom of it, you are standing where Texas Rangers once climbed to their lodge room.
It's a modest building, not a grand one, and that is part of its charm. This is what the beating heart of a frontier Hill Country town actually looked like. Make it a stop on a slow drive through Kerr County, pair it with the region's rivers and back roads, and give yourself a minute to imagine the store bell, the balcony, and the evening light on the stone.
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
- · George W. Woolls
- · Sam H. Wellborn
Themes & tags
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