Mohair is fabric of Hill Country town
ROCKSPRINGS — Opening the front door of the Historic Rocksprings Hotel across the street from the equally historic Edwards County Courthouse, I stepped into the sedate, oldfashioned lobby behind two women, one of them a regular guest. As Seabrook resident Lisa Criswell explained, she and her husband discovered Rocksprings last fall when they began looking for land on the western fringes of the Hill Country. The venerable hotel became their home away from home. She had brought her friend Nancy Maisel to show her what they had found.
“It’s a lovely place to come to,” Maisel said. Criswell would be signing papers at the courthouse the next day as she prepared to take possession of her new place in the country. Like a lot of people who have been reassessing their lives during the past year, she and her husband are leaving city life behind.
“The number of folks staying here looking for property has doubled or tripled since the pandemic,” hotel co-owner Debra Wolcott told me.
“Last month (March) was the best month we’ve had since we’ve been here,” said her husband, Craig Wolcott.
The Wolcotts, longtime Houstonians, can identify with the newcomers. In 2004, they bought a ranch 20 miles south of town and five years later discovered that the shabby, old hotel was on the market. “If no
other folks come along to take it, we’ll buy it,” they told the owners, despite having no hotel or B&B experience. No one else came along.
The Wolcotts left their native Houston for an unassuming, little town, population about 1,100, some 30 miles east of where the Edwards Plateau merges into the Lower Pecos canyonlands. At an elevation of 2,402 feet, Rocksprings is the highest town in the Hill Country. Native American tribes for eons and then thirsty travelers passing through the desolate area in the mid-1800s were familiar with a reliable flow of cool, clear spring water bubbling out of limestone crevices. When the small settlement that had grown up near the springs acquired a post office in 1891, the choice for a name was obvious.
Early settlers realized that sheep and goats are better adapted than cattle to the arid, brushy terrain. They’re still the backbone of the economy. Rocksprings calls itself the Angora Goat Capital of the World. The Rocksprings High School Angoras play in Angora Stadium; mascot Rocko, the fighting Angora billy, watches from the sidelines. The local newspaper, the Rocksprings Record and Texas Mohair Weekly, is in its 128th year, serving an area that produces about 90 percent of the nation’s mohair.
As I learned from Steve Haynes, manager of the PriourVarga Wool and Mohair Warehouse, mohair caught on during World War II, when American soldiers fighting in Europe needed clothing that would keep them dry and warm. Haynes, whose great-great-grandfather arrived in the area in the 1880s, was working for a Freeport chemical plant when he accepted his grandfather’s invitation in 1982 to come back home and take over the family sheep and goat operation. He’s never regretted the move.
“The money out here was minuscule, but the peace of mind was worth a whole lot more than the dollars,” he said as he reached into a big wooden crate of recently sheared mohair ready for grading.
It’s always been peaceful in Rocksprings, for the most part. The courthouse burned in 1898, and Rocksprings residents were responsible for a horrendous lynching of a Mexican man in 1910; otherwise, nothing much out of the ordinary happened until 1927.
On April 12 of that year, around 7 in the evening, a mile-wide tornado roared through, taking the lives of more than 70 people. Hundreds more in the town of about 800 were injured, and all but 12 of the town’s 400 structures were demolished. Rocksprings resident Claud Gilmer, a future speaker of the Texas House of Representatives, told reporters at the time he saw chunks of hail weighing 10 and 12 pounds crashing through roofs. The 50,000gallon water tower crashed to the ground and burst open, flooding nearby streets and drowning some of the injured who were trapped in the debris.
Years ago, I heard a story about a child who was caught up in the swirling, 260-mph winds and blown like a rag doll over the water tower (before it fell, presumably). As I heard the story, she somehow survived, although I had never taken the time to learn the details.
Barbara Perkins, who published a book about the tornado in 2018, confirmed a version of the incredible tale. She reports that 14-year-old Leona Wittenburg was taking a bath when the tornado hit the family home and sucked up the bathtub with Leona in it. The winds carried her over the water tower and dropped her, still in the tub, a half mile to the east. She stepped out of the tub battered, bruised and naked but otherwise unhurt. Her widowed mother and 8-year-old brother were killed.
The hotel, in business since 1916, was heavily damaged that horrific night but served as a refuge for dozens of survivors. Passing through a succession of owners over the years, it was still open more than eight decades later, when the Wolcotts bought it. They kept it open during extensive renovations.
Debra runs the hotel during the week, while Craig, a semiretired lawyer, semi-practices law in Kerrville. They spend their weekends at their ranch or taking care of hotel business.
Today, the Historic Rocksprings Hotel offers 11 units furnished in what Debra calls an eclectic style that occasionally reminds nostalgic guests of their grandmother’s house. With paintings adorning the walls, books lining the upstairs corridors and Kelso, the Wolcott’s little Cairn terrier greeting guests from his doggy playpen in the lobby, the hotel is a fine place to unwind. There’s no food service, but guests are welcome to cook their own meals in the hotel’s commercial-sized kitchen.
Guests include exotic-game hunters, as well as ecotourists and cavers. They’re drawn to the nearby Devil’s Sinkhole, a 350foot-deep cavern that’s home to some 6 million Mexican freetailed bats, and Kickapoo Cavern, featuring a column as tall as an eight-story building. Dark-sky aficionados also frequent the hotel, as do car clubs and travelers taking the southern route to Big Bend National Park.
Recent guests include a young man who had been bicycling for a couple of years through South America; he was on his way back home to Pennsylvania. Another young South African man stayed for several weeks while he helped local ranchers grade their mohair.
“We meet people from all over,” Debra says, “and when they enjoy the hotel, it makes it all worthwhile.”