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The Charms of the Big City in the Heart of Texas Hill
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Great Homes Destinations & Lifestyles
Erich Schlegel for The New York Times
Comanche Trace, a planned community in Kerrville, Tex. More Photos >
By TAMMY LA GORCE
Published: October 15, 2009
KERRVILLE, Tex. — THE actor Thomas Haden Church has a theory
about how this city 65 miles northwest of San Antonio in the Hill
Country became a hot spot for out-of-towners.
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“There are a ton of summer camps in
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Kerrville, dating back about 100
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years,” Mr. Church said by phone
recently while driving from his 2,000-
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acre ranch outside Kerrville to Austin,
roughly 130 miles away. “These camps
cater to the affluent, and generation upon generation of
people that have money across the state would bring their
children here and pick them up two weeks later. They
started thinking, ‘Wow, it’s beautiful here. Why don’t we
buy a second home or a little farm or a ranch?’ ”
An Urban Escape in Kerrville, Tex.
On the banks of the placid Guadalupe River and
surrounded by grassy hills dotted with cypress and live
oaks, Kerrville can feel like a Florida suburb — without the palm trees, blistering heat and
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/16/greathomesanddestinations/16kerrville.html
10/16/2009
The Charms of the Big City in the Heart of Texas Hill Country - NYTimes.com
Page 2 of 3
beach access. Because it has a Home Depot, a Starbucks
and a performing arts center that draws national acts, it
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provides modern amenities other Hill Country towns don’t.
Kerrville’s two museums, the Hill Country Museum and the
Museum of Western Art, merit a visit — the Hill Country
Map
Kerrville, Tex.
Museum for its context-bestowing examination of life as
lived by a well-heeled Kerrville family in the early 20th
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century, and the larger Museum of Western Art for its wellrounded collection of cowboy and American Indian art.
But it’s the performing arts rather than the visual ones that Kerrville tends to rally around.
Mr. Church recalled a conversation he had with Ronny Cox, an actor and singer with
whom he worked on a recent film: “He said to me, ‘You live in Texas, right? Do you know
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where Kerrville is?’ He knew it from the folk festival. It’s amazing how many people know
about the folk festival.”
The Kerrville Folk Festival takes up residence for more than two weeks in May and June at
the 50-acre Quiet Valley Ranch. Each year it draws dozens of musical storytellers and
some 30,000 fans.
The singer Robert Earl Keen, who recently released his 14th studio album, “The Rose
Hotel” (Universal Nashville), and who lives in Kerrville with his wife and two daughters,
said the festival was his launching pad. “They have a new-songwriters contest, and the first
time I got up onstage there in the early ’80s, I won it,” Mr. Keen said. “It gave me a big
boost.” He has lived in Kerrville for four years and also owns what he calls a shed where he
writes music 10 miles away, between Kerrville and the cowboy town of Bandera. “The
refrigerator there is full of beer and Big Red,” he said. “I’ll spend several days writing and
eating bologna sandwiches. Every man should have a shed.”
But singer-songwriters aren’t the only kind of musicians Kerrville supports. The 834-seat
Kathleen C. Cailloux City Center for the Performing Arts regularly schedules orchestral
music and acts like the Yamato Drummers, from Japan.
Kerrville dates back to 1846, when Joshua Brown, a settler from Kentucky, arrived in
search of giant cypress trees to supply a shingle-making operation. Later, toward the turn
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of the 20th century, it became home to the developer Charles A. Schreiner, Kerrville’s
best-known philanthropist. (Schreiner University, a liberal arts college in town, is named
for him, and the Hill Country Museum is his former home.) Many residents still claim
ancestral ties to early Kerrville.
Even on concert-free days Kerrville’s historic downtown is worth exploring for its
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shopping and dining. Mr. Keen recommends Wolfmueller’s Books, which sells rare and
used volumes, for its “abundance of Texana.” “It’s the kind of bookstore I go to when I’m
on the road, because you’re always going to find something,” he added. Within a block or
two of Wolfmueller’s are Hill Country Music, offering dulcimers and American Indian
flutes; the Kerr Arts and Cultural Center, which hosts the annual Southwest Gourd Fine
Art Show in spring and the Texas Furniture Makers Show in fall; and River’s Edge Gallery,
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which sells Western landscapes and still lifes.
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A version of this article appeared in print on October 16, 2009, on
page C33 of the New York edition.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/16/greathomesanddestinations/16kerrville.html
10/16/2009
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The Charms of the Big City in the Heart of Texas Hill
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Published: October 15, 2009
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Kerrville’s best restaurants tend to feature Tex-Mex and other
regional flavors. Mr. Church likes Billy Gene’s. “It’s the kind of place
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where you get real Texas Hill Country cooking — skin-on mashed
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potatoes, chicken-fried steak, Texas meatloaf, which has a lot of
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seasoning,” he said. Also on his list of favorites are two taquerias:
Conchita’s on Main, across the street from the courthouse, and
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It was Kerrville’s cultural scene and
downtown that attracted Raymond
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and Judy Geddes, retired educators
from Rathdrum, Idaho, who became part-time residents
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five years ago. “He likes to golf, and I like to act,” said Ms.
Geddes, 65, from the patio of their hilltop four-bedroom,
2,400-square-foot home recently. “We looked at all these
places, but Kerrville appealed to both of us,” said Ms.
Geddes, who was to appear the same evening in a
production of “Alone Together Again” at the nearby Point
Theater, part of the Hill Country Arts Foundation. Ms.
An Urban Escape in Kerrville, Tex.
Geddes is also a member of the Hill Country Chorale, which
performs at the Cailloux center.
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As second-home owners and retirees the Geddeses are
typical Kerrville newcomers. Though there are a number of
big-name residents — the Texas gadfly Kinky Friedman
lives nearby — housing is relatively affordable. Ronald
Hackett, president of the Kerrville Board of Realtors, said a
Kerrville, Tex.
three-bedroom, two-bathroom house with pleasant views
could be bought for about $200,000. A similar-size house
in newer planned communities like Comanche Trace — a
1,300-acre property with a 27-hole golf course — starts at
$250,000. Higher-end homes in Comanche Trace go for over $1 million.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/16/greathomesanddestinations/16kerrville.html?pagew... 10/16/2009
The Charms of the Big City in the Heart of Texas Hill Country - NYTimes.com
Page 2 of 2
If there is a drawback to living in Kerrville, it’s felt most acutely by allergy sufferers. The
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abundance of cedar and oak pollen here tends to cause allergies and hay fever. But the
climate is generally a plus: Kerrville’s higher elevation drives off the humidity that settles
across much of Texas in summer and keeps the area a few degrees cooler than Austin and
San Antonio.
Kerrville is “friendly, it’s convenient and it’s a beautiful part of the country,” Mr. Keen
said. It also has a musical pedigree that, for someone like him, is hard to ignore.
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“Jimmie Rodgers died in Kerrville,” he said. “It was his last home.” Golf courses, out-ofstate transplants and Starbucks aside, he added, any town that was country enough for the
“father of country music” was country enough for him.
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