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Our General Stores Bucket List

If you have watched enough Westerns, you have likely seen a scene or two play out in a general store. In the small towns of the American West, the general store played an important role in everyday life.


As a fan of old Westerns, I find one of the most memorable general-store scenes in the 1953 classic Shane, starring Alan Ladd. Much of the conflict between a powerful rancher and struggling homesteaders unfolds at Grafton’s General Store and adjoining saloon, which serves as the town’s commercial and social center.

Like so many things in history, the general store occupied a particular slice of time that is now gone. It was eventually replaced by stores that were bigger, broader, and supposedly better—but maybe not.


The closest thing to a general store in my world is the Little Burro Country Store, located about an hour south of Alpine in the Big Bend Valley, just north of Study Butte and Big Bend National Park. Our cabin is only a few miles away, and whenever we need something to get us through, this is the place we shop.

The Little Burro carries just enough essential goods to keep locals from making the hour-long drive to the grocery store in Alpine. More than once, however, what I expected to be a quick visit has turned into a much longer stay. I have enjoyed my share of conversations on the store’s front porch—a reminder that a good country store is still more than simply a place to shop.

The Little Burro is a small surviving example of the role general stores played in the history of the American frontier. It provides essential supplies and serves as a gathering place, with plenty of seating where locals and visitors can pass the time.


Old general stores were important for several reasons, not the least of which is that they helped the local economy. Farmers and ranchers bought supplies there. They also sold or traded their own goods. These stores connected small, isolated communities to the outside world, often acting as post offices, telegraph offices, and stagecoach stops.

Genuine general stores are a thing of the past. What remains are some really cool General Stores around the Lone Star State that, once you walk through the doors, revive nostalgic feelings and take you back to a simpler time. Some of these old stores occupy the same piece of real estate that housed them from their beginnings. Others are housed in old buildings that look and feel like an old-time general store.

Cheryl and I hope to visit as many of the remaining general store locations in Texas as we can on upcoming road trips. I have written about a few of these stores and will follow up with posts on the others as we visit them. The checkmarks indicate the stores we have visited. I hope you will come along for the ride.

Here is our General Stores Bucket List. Leave a comment with info about any locations missing from our list.

Hill Country and Central Texas
✓ Camp Verde General Store — Camp Verde, near Kerrville
• Coats Grocery and Market — Gause
✓ Gruene General Store — Gruene Historic District, New Braunfels
• Luckenbach General Store — Luckenbach
✓ Bandera General Store — Bandera
✓ Fischer Store — Fischer
✓ Kendalia General Store — Kendalia
✓ Garven Store — near Vanderpool
✓ Pipe Creek General Store and Dance Hall — Pipe Creek
✓ Welcome General Store — Welcome, near Brenham


East Texas
✓ Jefferson General Store — Jefferson
• T. C. Lindsey & Co. General Store — Jonesville
• Edge General Store — Edge, near Hearne
✓ Farmers Mercantile — Orange
• General Mercantile and Old-Time String Shop — Nacogdoches


North Texas
• The General Store — Fort Worth Stockyards
• Texas General Store — Grapevine
• Martin General Store — Granbury


West Texas
• Eggemeyer’s General Store — San Angelo

Gulf Coast and South Texas
• Girouard’s General Store — Freeport
• Morales Store — Morales, near Edna

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Back to the Ranch

My grandfather was sixty-six when I was born at Mission City Hospital in 1956. The hospital was small, but it was just right for our little town of Mission, Texas. I wasn’t his first grandchild, but I was the only one who lived nearby.


By the time I was born, my grandfather had already lived in Mission for over forty-five years. He worked as a real estate developer, served on the Mission City Council, led Boy Scouts Troop 20, and as a Notary Public helped many people in the community.


Yet, throughout all his years in Mission, he never forgot his roots on the family ranch in Duval County. He maintained a lifelong love for the outdoors and returned to the ranch every year to hunt or ride his horse. Although he had left the ranch many years earlier, the ranch had never left him. It remained a part of his heart.

He wrote in his journal about how much he loved ranch life. Here’s part of what he wrote:

Returning to the ranch proper at the end of the day, you feel hungry and ready to eat. Your appetite is plentiful, and by nine o’clock you are already in bed and so sweetly tired that nothing can perturb the quietness of your nerves. The breeze on the east porch where I slept was an ideal location.

Trips of this kind were better than medicine. Your feelings are better served and the next day you have a desire to work vigorously.

And so time was consumed in these routines of ranch life. What a wonderful method of passing your time.


My grandfather shared many stories about life on the ranch. Reflecting on those stories helped me understand how the ranch shaped him. Ranch life helped him develop a strong work ethic and become someone who never complained and always tried to help others.


I also admired how he kept his love for the outdoors and adventure all his life. From his childhood to his later years, the ranch was like good medicine for him. He often talked about riding horses, hunting, and even stretching barbed-wire fences. I was always fascinated.


After my first visit to the ranch, I tried to go back as often as possible. I found that the ranch had the same effect on me as it did on my grandfather. Most importantly, each visit made me feel closer to him. Since the ranch was special to him, it became special to me too.

I feel the same way whenever I visit our off-grid place in Big Bend. When I’m there, my mind feels calmer, my heart feels stronger, and the desert air refreshes me. Time seems to slow down. The hard work is satisfying, sleep comes easily, and life’s routines feel simpler and more meaningful.

Now I understand what my grandfather meant. Places like these truly are better than medicine. Whenever I go back to our little spot in the Chihuahuan Desert, it feels like I’m returning to the ranch and to him.

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Visiting El Frijolillo

My grandfather was a storyteller. From as early as I can remember, he shared wonderful stories with me—stories that made my imagination sit up and pay attention. I loved listening as he told Aesop’s fables, the story of Androcles and the Lion, and other fascinating tales. This was during an age when television was still in its infancy and storytelling remained a treasured form of entertainment.

But the stories I loved most were those he told about his childhood growing up on a ranch in Duval County. To this day, Duval County remains rugged scrub country, populated by mesquite, cactus, and other stubborn vegetation seemingly determined to stick, cut, and wound the unsuspecting traveler.

As a boy, I was captivated by his stories of riding horseback across the ranch. During his teenage years, he worked as a cowhand on the George West Ranch, located not far from his family’s ranch. His stories made me want to be a cowboy, just as he had been before leaving ranch life behind to attend business college in San Antonio.

One day, he told me about being thrown from his horse at a place he called El Frijolillo (pronounced free-ho-lee-oh). He described it as a thick, tangled cowlick of mountain laurel and chaparral at one end of a pasture. The fall was apparently memorable enough to remain vivid in his mind decades later. As a boy, I often dreamed about that mysterious place called El Frijolillo.


When I was barely a teenager, my grandfather arranged for me to visit my country cousins at the ranch. He bought me a bus ticket from Mission to San Diego and sent me off on a great adventure—all by myself, with only a small suitcase in hand.

The only thing I remember about the bus ride was sitting next to an older woman who had doused herself in an overpowering amount of perfume. I could hardly breathe and pressed my face against the window, hoping for even the slightest whiff of fresh air. Toxic fumes aside, I made it to my destination, where my Uncle Florentino, my grandfather’s half-brother, was waiting to pick me up.

Florentino was a towering man. When I stepped off the bus, there he stood—wearing khaki pants, a long-sleeved shirt, black boots, and a straw cowboy hat. He looked down at me with welcoming eyes, shook my hand, took my bag, and led me to his pickup truck for the nearly twenty-mile drive to the ranch. That day marked the beginning of a lifelong friendship with Florentino.

I told Florentino that while I was at the ranch, I wanted to see El Frijolillo. He laughed and remarked that this was the very place where a horse had violently bucked my grandfather to the ground. Then he assured me that I would indeed get to see El Frijolillo—on horseback. I grinned from ear to ear and could hardly wait.

My cousins made sure that I experienced plenty of great adventures. They took me rabbit hunting, led me on hikes through the brush, climbed with me into deer blinds to survey the land, and introduced me to horseback riding. I killed my first rabbit, and my aunt cooked it for supper that very evening. Unbelievable! This adventure was already more than I had expected.


But the greatest adventure of all was riding a pony out to El Frijolillo, the place that had etched itself into my grandfather’s memory decades earlier. For whatever reason, he never forgot that fall—perhaps because being thrown from a horse was a rare occurrence, or because the impact had bruised itself so deeply into his memory.

I was there. Finally. As I surveyed the place, I could hear my grandfather’s story echoing in my mind. Standing on that very ground made me feel even more connected to him and to the ranch land that had nurtured him. This was part of my history—and now I had become part of the story of El Frijolillo.

Decades have passed since my great adventure on the ranch. When my grandfather told me stories about life on the ranch, he unwittingly gave me a wonderful gift. He gave me a connection to the land and to my family. Best of all, he gave me a connection to the boy he once was. Now, whenever I think about El Frijolillo, I can hear my grandfather’s voice and feel inspired to keep the storytelling tradition he shared with me alive.

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A Tin Ceiling and Wood Bunk Beds

Mark Twain once observed that the secret to making progress is to get started. If there is one thing I have learned about progress since starting our off-grid adventure in Big Bend it is that slow progress is better than no progress. And making any progress means making decisions and then taking a step, no matter how small, to get started.

Taking small steps is definitely paying off for us at our off-grid property. Because we can only visit for short periods every few weeks, we have to make the most of every visit. That means careful planning, making lists and checking them twice, purchasing materials, and then working the plan.


I keep a little black notebook where I draw sketches of upcoming projects, make lists of materials, keep important measurements I need as I dream and plan, and make general notes about this and that. The cool thing is that as I leaf through the pages, I can see a record of all of the progress we have made since 2018.

Cheryl and I spent the past week at the cabin. Our hope for the week was to make a little more progress toward the completion of the guest cabin built by my Band of Fathers group that I meet with every Wednesday.


Project One was to run the electrical wiring and refrigerant lines for the mini-split. That’s where my neighbor Joe Pound comes in. He is an off-grid guru who knows just about everything about off-grid survival. Joe stopped by to do the work on the mini-split while I finished wiring electrical outlets and switches.


With the electrical and refrigerant lines in place, I was able to add the final pieces of insulation and paneling to complete the walls. It was a good feeling to have all of the walls in the main room completed.

Project Number Two was to finish insulating the ceiling and then adding the corrugated tin panels. I know that there are other ceiling options, but we like the rustic look of the corrugated tin. Hanging tin, however, is definitely a two-man job. My neighbor Chris Smith stopped by to help me finish all of the ceiling work. Once again, it was such a good feeling to look up and know that I could now check the ceiling work off of my project list.


Project Number Three was to build the bunk beds. Cheryl and I drove to McCoy’s in Alpine, with black notebook in hand, to purchase the lumber for the bunk bed build. With the lumber secured in the bed of my truck, we stopped by the Dairy Queen next door to McCoy’s for a quick Texas gourmet lunch before heading back to the cabin.


A couple of months ago Cheryl and I took our granddaughters to IKEA. While there Cheryl noticed that their bunk bed mattresses were on sale so we purchased the mattresses right away. One more thing off the list.


The bunk bed build was a fun project. We were able to build both sets of bunks beds. I decided to use black iron pipe and flanges to make the ladder to the top bunks. On our next trip I will install a grab bar and add a safety bar to the top bunks, all using black iron. The final step will be to build an open storage closet between the bunk beds so guests can have a place to stow gear and hang clothes.

As we do on every visit, we invited our neighbors over for a cookout on Saturday evening. This is always a fun time to reconnect with one another and to enjoy conversation around the campfire. Especially enjoyed meeting a new neighbor who is making a go of off-grid living not far from us.

On Sunday we enjoyed worship at Terlingua Ranch Community Church where we have attended since starting our off-grid adventure in 2018. Love this little church in the desert.

Before we headed home on Monday, we sat outside to watch the solar eclipse. Although it did not get completely dark at the cabin, it did feel a little like dusk. This is the second eclipse we have watched from the cabin.


We returned home by way of Uvalde where we spent the night with our nephew Ryan and his sweet family. Highway 90 is a fun alternate route home for us. Even stopped at the world’s smallest Buc-ee’s east of Marathon.


Cheryl and I are happy to have made a little more progress on our guest cabin and, best of all, grateful for the time spent with our friends and neighbors in the Chihuahuan Desert.