Historic Scoot Inn

There has been a business on this corner of East Fourth and Navasota since 1871, when Sam and Nancy Wilson opened a grocery and mercantile to serve the traffic arriving on the newly built railroad. The current front dates from 1889. That makes the building one of the oldest continuously used commercial structures in Austin, and it advertises itself as the oldest bar in Central Texas, a claim that needs a small asterisk. The asterisk is that it did not hold a saloon licence until 1940, though it had a long established reputation for bootlegging well before that. It holds the fourth oldest liquor licence in the city. For most of the twentieth century it was a neighbourhood bar in a working class, largely Mexican American part of East Austin, and it was that for far longer than it has been anything else. It started booking bands in 2006 and was renovated in 2016, gaining a large beer garden with a food trailer, while the small indoor room was turned into a lounge. The renovation kept the shell and the front, so what a visitor sees is a nineteenth century store building with a modern outdoor stage behind it. The railroad that the original grocery was built to serve still runs a block away.