Gruene Texas

A one-horse town that was once prosperous and is today a dusty tourist joint, Gruene (pronounced “green”), Texas, has seen better days.  In the flapper era it bubbled with slackers and slicksters, farmers in overalls and plough salesmen in suits.  You can hear the model-T’s and horses barreling into town to resupply with food and catch up on gossip at the Gruene Mercantile.  H.D. Gruene looked around at the cotton fields he planted, at the tenant farmers streaming in, at the bales hauled off by rail to San Anton, and felt justified in building up the place, investing here in a bank, a feed store, then a post office and a finally a spanking new post office building.  This town would be a permanent monument to his foresight and hard work.

It came as a bitter shock when the boll weevil invasion decimated the cotton crop and farming ceased to be viable, in the 1920s.  Suddenly the town became a backwater.  Old man Gruene died in 1920, and his son stayed on, managing things through the Depression.  Must have been sad for him to watch the town move in slow-motion, haunted by the memories of the place’s former bustle.

Gruene, Texas, is today preserved as a nostalgia series of storefronts not far from I-35 between San Antonio and Austin.  But the decision to preserve the old buildings, to redo some, has allowed a new identity to seep into the tired structures.  Far from being only a Disneyesque nostalgia parking lot, Gruene  today has transformed itself into an art town, centered on the tourists traveling through, yes, but also able to keep four or five bed-and-breakfasts and around ten local artists going year-round.  And able to keep the star attraction, the Gruene Dance Hall, famous in a region famed for music venues.  Willie Nelson and a host of country stars play here regularly, and the sense of authenticity is unmistakable when you step in the Dancehall’s crooked doorway.  Gruene has come back to life, transformed but coursing with fire and venom.