9878 STATE HIGHWAY 16 S, Pipe Creek, TX 78063

Out along Highway Sixteen... where the Hill Country starts to feel like the Hill Country... there's a place that's been gathering folks for better than a hundred years. This was Lipan Apache country, once. Today it's Pipe Creek, Texas - twenty miles from Helotes, eight miles shy of Bandera, the Cowboy Capital of the World.

The general store went up in the late eighteen-hundreds. Feed, supplies... and a reason for the whole ranching community to come to town. In nineteen-thirty, they built the dance hall onto the side. Electricity showed up ten years after that. Folks danced here.

Worshipped here. Watched movies. Even skated. In 'forty-four the cafe moved in - and stayed the better part of fifty years. Two-thousand-thirteen, the doors closed. And then somebody who loved it bought it - and put it back. Foundations, stabilized. Plumbing, septic, water, electrical - all of it, new.

Central air. ADA restrooms. An expanded dining room. A grand fireplace and a chandelier that make the old room feel like a lodge. Every bit of it done in period... with everything a modern operator needs, hid behind the walls. Outside: oaks and pecans.

Picnic tables. A concrete dance floor, and a stage under open sky. Three acres. Four buildings - the store and hall, a restored nineteen-thirties stone cottage, the old carriage house, and apartments for lodging. Chicken coops. A silo. What's left of a cotton gin. A stone chimney from the eighteen-hundreds. And no zoning restrictions. None. So the question isn't what this place was. It's what you'd make of it.