Hot guts is what Elgin calls its sausage. The guts are literal, the natural pork casing the meat is stuffed into; the heat is the usual reading of the other half, though some hold the hot simply means served hot. Either way it is coarse ground beef with beef fat, salt and cracked black pepper, smoked over oak. The old recipe carried cayenne as well, cut back after the Bracewell family bought Southside Market in 1968 and now sold again at full strength as a separate product named 1882. Both houses of the Texas Legislature passed resolutions in 1995 naming Elgin the Sausage Capital of Texas, and George Frazier, known as Bud, is the man generally credited with settling the recipe. He said he became a butcher at sixteen; his obituary has him delivering meat at nine.
The market's own dates are the subject of a long argument: 1882 for the slaughterhouse legend and 1886 for the market. Daniel Vaughn spent a year in Bastrop County deed records, Sanborn fire insurance maps and the Elgin Courier archive and concluded the 1886 opening can be neither proved nor disproved, because the 1890 census burned and the newspaper archive begins in 1898. The record does hold that James William Moon bought the downtown lot in 1883 and died in April 1887, that Sanborn maps show nothing built on it until 1893, and that the name South Side Market first appears in print on 28 March 1918, when W. A. Fletcher and Son came down from the north side of town and announced it, reaching Moon's lot the next year. Lee Wilson, who had learned butchering in his father's shop at Giddings, was running the market by 1923 and bought the building and its slaughter plant in 1927. It left downtown for US 290 in 1992.
Getting there
30.3496, -97.3863
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