Shakespeare At Winedale

University of Texas undergraduates have been performing Shakespeare in a converted hay barn in rural Fayette County since 1970, and the reason is that an oil heiress looked at the barn and saw the Globe. Ima Hogg had bought the old Lewis place in 1963 and spent the next four years restoring it, using timber cut on the farm itself. She had already had the barn fitted out as a theatre, with vented side panels, part of the loft taken out for balconies and a two tiered stage. Talking with Professor James B. Ayres of the English department, known to everyone as Doc, she suggested he stage Shakespeare in it. He brought students down that autumn, and the first performance, Much Ado About Nothing, went up on the fifteenth of November 1970. It began as a course and it is still a course: students build the set, make the costumes and play every part, several plays a summer. The building Hogg restored had its own long life first. William S. Townsend put up a one room house with a sleeping loft here around 1834, of cedar timbers. Samuel K. Lewis bought it in 1848, enlarged it, and worked the land as a cotton plantation with thirteen enslaved people. In the mid 1850s he lobbied to have a public road run past his front door, and the house became a stage stop between Brenham and La Grange known for years as Sam Lewis' Stopping Place. His heirs sold to Joseph G. Wagner in 1882, and a Wagner lived in the house until 1961. Hogg gave the property to her own university, and accounts differ on the acreage and even on the year of the gift, so the safe version is the plain one. She bought it, she fixed it, and she handed it over.