Industry & Science
Hruska's Store and Bakery
Before kolaches became a chain product they were a Saturday morning thing at a filling station in Ellinger. The family opened a store here in 1912. In 1952 Frankie Hruska and his wife Bessie built a service station on Highway 71 and moved the store into it, and from 1962 a local woman baked kolaches there on Saturday mornings, which is how a place selling fuel turned into a place people planned…
Entertainment & Sports
The Bugle Boy
The building is a World War Two barracks from Camp Swift, near Bastrop, which was the largest army training camp in Texas and held ninety thousand troops at its peak, along with roughly 4,800 German prisoners of war, most of them taken from Rommel's Afrika Korps in North Africa and later from Normandy.
Museums & Art
The Czech Heritage Center
Fayette County was one of the principal destinations of Czech and Moravian migration into Texas, and this centre on the edge of La Grange exists to hold what that migration left behind. The main building, finished in 2009, has a glass entrance meant to read as the beacon of light that drew the settlers here, and inside it holds the Our New Home museum and the Bill and Betty Melnar Library, which…
Industry & Science
The Jersey Barnyard
Four generations of the Frerichs family have milked Jersey cows on this land outside La Grange, and the dairy has been running for something over a century. Around a hundred and thirty cows are milked twice a day, every day, which across the life of the farm adds up to more than fifty three thousand separate milkings and no days off.
History
The Monument Hill Brewery
On a sandstone bluff two hundred feet above the Colorado River there is a tomb, and a short walk down the ravine behind it, the stone shell of one of the first commercial breweries in Texas. The tomb was built in 1848 to hold the remains of Texans killed in two disasters of the Republic era.
Museums & Art
The Texas Quilt Museum
Karey Patterson Bresenhan and Nancy O'Bryant Puentes had been bringing thousands of quilts to the International Quilt Festival in Houston every year since 1974, and the same frustration recurred annually: the work hung for a few days in a convention centre and then went home to closets and beds.
Industry & Science
Weikel's and the Bon Ton
The bakery on the west side of La Grange is the fourth act of a family business that began in 1929 with a cafe. Alvin Weikel and his brother, known to everyone as Pop, opened the Bon Ton Cafe in downtown La Grange that year, and their first steady customers were the crews laying the first pipeline through Fayette County.
Elsewhere in Texas
Hear it from the road
Whistlestop tells you this story automatically when you drive past. No searching, no tapping, nothing to ask.
