Hill Country question: Are ‘the Houstons’ Art lovers?
ART — Spending a cool, sunny Sunday in Mason County last weekend, the bluebonnets just now blooming alongside Hill Country highways, Plato and Tolstoy came to mind. So did Picasso, Georgia O’Keeffe and Stephen Sondheim. So did Mrs. Coleman, my fine arts professor at Abilene Christian University long ago. They’re only a few of the countless artists, thinkers and philosophers who’ve devoted deep thought to a question at least as old as the cave paintings of Lascaux in France or the pictographs in Rattlesnake Canyon near Langtry.
The question: What is Art? The answer, despite the deep thinking across the eons, is easy. Art is a postage stamp-sized community founded by German immigrants in the 1850s. You’ll find Art 90 miles west of Austin, among the cacti and cattle ranches near Mason.
Wikipedia notes that Art is a “highly dispersed” community. It is that, for sure. Like Houston, you’re not always sure when you’re in the city and when you’re not. (I’m guessing that’s the last time I’ll write “Like Houston” in this column about Art.) Along state Highway 29 is an old general store/ café — now shuttered — and on a gentle rise across the road the venerable Art United Methodist Church. It’s an elegant steepled building constructed in 1891 of reddish-brown sandstone, the rocks quarried from a hill a mile southwest of the church. Services were conducted in German until 1927. Except for a few farmhouses nearby, there’s not much else to signal that you’re in Art or out. Population is 18 or so and has been for the past hundred years.
Among the residents of Art (Artians? Artites? Artisans?) is a bona fide artist, Laura Lewis, who lives with her husband Don a quarter mile or so from the Llano River, the water meandering through great gray slabs of rock across the road from their hilltop house and studio. The Lewises are Lubbock natives, and Laura, 64, usually
paints High Plains scenes — a cotton harvest near Crosbyton, rugged formations on the Caprock near Post, hardy sunflowers in a field, old oilfield equipment. She’s drawn to the West Texas sky, to open spaces.
She’s known as a High Plains regionalist, even though she and Don have lived in the Hill Country since 2011.
“The truth is, I don’t want to paint this area,” she told me last weekend. “It’s too pretty. It’s a completely different color palette.”
Heart of the community
She loves her neighbors, though, particularly fellow members of the Art United Methodist Church. She organized last Sunday’s special music service, complete with a cellist, a violinist, a couple of guitarists (including Laura
herself ) and a men’s choir (down to four, director Stephen Mutschink announced, since a third of the choir had other things to do that morning). The church, albeit small, is the heart of the community — and has been for more than 160 years.
According to a sesquicentennial history of Art by Ervin M. Jordan, three German families, including the author’s forebears, left Fredericksburg in 1856 and settled on Upper Willow Creek. The families built rudimentary log cabins, cleared fields, put in gardens, herded livestock and kept a sharp eye out for Indians eager to steal horses. Once they stole a child.
Jordan tells the tale of 8-year-old William Hoerster, who in July 1859 was herding his family’s cattle when a band of Indians swooped in and carried him away. He was taken to Taos, N.M., and held prisoner for three years. Through the efforts of legendary frontiersman Kit Carson and the Texas Legislature, the youngster was ransomed for $500.
“Later in life,” the author writes, “William was accidentally cut when an axe he was welding (sic) slipped and cut a large gash in his head. The writer well remembers how in later life, he would hire himself out to some of the families in and around Art as a day laborer.”
In 1883, J.A. Hoerster — William’s father? — opened the first Upper Willow store and in 1885 sold it to Otto Plehwe, who also opened the first post office. As postmaster, Plehwe changed the name of the community from Upper Willow to Plehweville.
There were problems with the name. For one thing, nobody but Otto seemed able to pronounce it. (Easier to sneeze it than to say it, Austin writer Mike Cox suggested.) For another, mail kept going to Pflugerville, near Austin.
According to historian Jordan, a school teacher named Eli Dechart “married one of Plehweville’s young maidens” in 1918 and moved into the community. In 1920, Dechart acquired the store and post office and decided to change the name of the community again. To Art. Mail no longer got misdirected to Pflugerville. Instead, it went to Arp, in East Texas. Art it was, though, and Art it has remained for nearly a hundred years.
City ‘auslanders’
At the potluck lunch after church — on my plate were enchiladas, King Ranch casserole, green beans and new potatoes, banana pudding and chocolate cream pie — I asked Jan Jordan whether Austinites were spilling into the ruggedly picturesque Art area. Jordan, an Abilene native who married into one of the three founding families, has lived in Art for 45 years.
“Houstons!” she harrumphed. “I call ’em Houstons!”
That’s her disparaging name for Houstonians, Austinites, San Antonians, Dallasites and other city folks who spend their city money to purchase farms and ranches in the area and try to become Artians. They import their city ways and city politics and city attitudes to a part of the state that time’s forgotten and city folks are unlikely to improve. Others at the table assured me she was just kidding. Sort of.
“That’s just Jan,” Laura Lewis said, adding that the more common Hill Country term is “auslander,” outsider.
“It just breaks my heart to see what’s happening,” said Roger Jordan, Jan’s cousin by marriage and a rancher who, as we talked by phone, was driving to northern Colorado to buy bulls. It’s not that they resent “auslanders.” He just hates to see land being sold off that’s been in families for generations. He and his wife are fortunate, he said, because their children want to hold on to the land.
Mason County may one day see a growing and prosperous modern Art, but I didn’t mention that possibility to Jan Jordan. Instead, we reminisced about her ’68 Chevy Impala in Abilene years ago. I mentioned how good the banana pudding was. I let my big-city origins slide.
So that’s Art. Knowing what it is leads to the next question: Why Art? Why is the community called Art?
A clue is in the spelling of the second postmaster’s surname.