Can ‘quaint’ heritage hold on in a growing Hill Country town?
BOERNE — Raymond Lunsford is no visionary. He’ll tell you that himself. A man with a plan? Not really, he says.
And yet if you happen to be on Main Street in this pleasant Hill Country town northwest of San Antonio and you wander into a venerable stone building called the Dienger Trading Co., you might question Lunsford’s veracity. Surely, the bustling bakery and bistro, the adjoining boutique featuring stylish apparel for men and women, the small bookstore in honor of the building’s public-library past, plus the beautifully restored meeting room upstairs, represent the culmination of a carefully considered business plan. A thriving business in a Boerne landmark, an enterprise at the heart of a prosperous community working to preserve its history against the onslaught of growth and change — somebody had to know what they were doing.
Owner Lunsford grins, ducks his head and insists that’s not exactly what happened. He’ll tell you that what he and his wife Lisa have accomplished — with invaluable help from a young designer who got her start in Houston — was originally more whimsy and happenstance than planning. Sit down with a gourmet sandwich in the bistro or cut into a slice of Lisa’s amazing coconut-cream pie in the bakery, and this congenial fellow is likely to drop by your table and tell you his story.
Lunsford, 62, grew up in Olney, a little town south of Wichita Falls. After graduating from Abilene Christian University in the 1970s, he went back home and started a small oil business.
After a divorce in 1999, he moved to San Antonio to be closer to his children and remarried in 2002. In San Antonio he and a friend started a business supplying modeling clay to schools and potters; he also happened to buy a day care center in Boerne for Lisa’s daughter to run. And he happened to notice in the San Antonio Express-News that Sammy’s Mexican Restaurant in Boerne was for sale. He happened to buy it.
“If we had ever been a waiter or a waitress, we’d have never done it,” he said. The restaurant business, he soon discovered, turned out to be “the hardest industry in the world.”
Sammy’s became Mama Lucita’s, which eventually became
Main Street Cafe. About that time Hitchin’ Post Liquor next door came up for sale, so the Lunsfords bought the building, asked Boerne what it needed and the answer was, a ladies shoe shop.
“My wife and I, with zero retail experience, fly to New York and buy a bunch of shoes, put in a little place called Head Over Heels,” he recalled.
A couple of months later, a house came open down the street. The Lunsfords bought it and put in a dress shop called Wear It’s At.
Meanwhile, the couple moved the shoes to the dress shop, which meant they had an empty building. Lisa suggested that since she loved to bake, they ought to open a bakery. They called it Dough, Ray & Me Coffee and Sweets.
As we talked, Lunsford remembered they also opened a sandwich shop near Boerne’s Walmart, as well as a pizza place in San Antonio that lasted a couple of years.
Doing all that in such a short period of time “just wasn’t smart,” Lunsford said, “but I didn’t know any better.”
The Lunsfords’ adopted town was laid out by German immigrants in 1852 and named for Ludwig Boerne, a Jewish German author and political activist. By 1884, the little town on Cibolo Creek — Texans pronounce it Bernie — boasted five hotels, various businesses and 250 residents.
That same year, Joseph and Ida Dienger (pronounced Dinger) built a limestone and rock building with gingerbread embellishments on Main Street, or Hauptstrasse. The ground floor was a grocery store; the couple and their seven children lived upstairs. A portion of the upstairs area became a meeting room for lodges and clubs. Joseph Dienger’s sisters, Lina and Louise, ran a dry goods store in a later addition to the building.
In recent decades the building has been Antler’s Restaurant, named for Dienger’s collection of 2,000 deer and moose antlers found in the basement; Boerne’s public library; a bank; and office space for geologists. It had been vacant for four years when Lunsford realized he needed to consolidate his various enterprises closer to the heart of downtown. In 2014, he acquired the 12,900-square-foot building, now on the National Register of Historic Places.
“We thought we’d just bought an old, dirty, vacant building in Boerne,” Lunsford said. “We’d bought a treasure and didn’t even know it.”
It took a young woman from Houston to show the Lunsfords what they had — and what they could do with it. Michelle Ernst and her husband Paul were living in the Heights, and she was doing business development and marketing for Montgomery Roth, a Houston architecture and interior design firm, when the couple decided to move to Boerne, where Paul’s family lived. She wandered into the Lunsfords’ Main Street Café looking for office space for a nonprofit group she was helping.
Lunsford told her about the old building he had just acquired, and she realized she had been driving by the place for years. “It’s one of those buildings where you see it, the shades are drawn, and you dream about what you would do for that building,” she recalled.
“Maybe I could use somebody like you,” Lunsford told her.
“It was very vague, some kind of interior design,” Ernst recalled, laughing. The first day on the job, he told me, ‘I want you to turn this into your dream. No budget. Just do what you want.’ ”
Ernst, now 35 and the mother of two youngsters, insisted that Lunsford draw up a budget and explained that he needed to consolidate his businesses under one name (Dienger Trading Co.). She upgraded the clothing lines and applied not only her design skills but also her marketing experience as she oversaw the building’s revival.
Even as she opened up the old, neglected structure and let in the light, Ernst made sure to remain as true as possible to its past. She knew she had been successful when she overcame the initial suspicions of the Dienger Belles, a group of local women dedicated to the building’s preservation. She’s now a partner in the business — and the youngest member of the Dienger Belles.
The Lunsfords’ superb restoration is one victory in the town’s daunting struggle to preserve its German heritage, its 19th-century architecture, its small-town sense of community. With a population that’s tripled in the last 20 years to nearly 16,000 and with downtown traffic congestion getting worse by the day, holding on to heritage is a challenge, to be sure.
More growth is on the way: a $45 million Buc-ee’s, a Hilton branded luxury hotel on Main Street and housing developments sprawling into the surrounding Hill Country. Signs in shop windows urge residents to “Keep Boerne Quaint.”
Plenty of struggling towns across this state would love to have Boerne’s problem, and yet dealing with rampant growth requires as much planning and attention as battling a small town’s demise. Even Raymond Lunsford, Boerne’s quintessential man without a plan, would agree that happenstance won’t get the job done.