Early Texas Hotels and Inns

The inn the plaque points to had a second chapter before the university took it. Joseph G. Wagner, a cobbler from Breslau, bought the Lewis house in 1882, and his family farmed there and ran a gin, mills and a general store into the twentieth century. Ima Hogg acquired it in 1963, drawn by Rudolph Melchior's painted ceilings, and first meant to move it to Bayou Bend. Instead she gathered about ten buildings around it and gave the property to the University of Texas in April 1967. Shakespeare at Winedale began in its theater barn in 1970.

What the plaque says

Early Texas Hotels and Inns Two miles east, at Winedale, is the Old "Sam Lewis Stopping Place" of the 1850s--a typical early Texas inn, now a University of Texas research center. Built 1834, as a settler's 2-room log cabin of hand-hewn cedar; then enlarged twice and (with work of local German craftsmen) improved in style, it was home after 1848 to Lewis, his wife, eight children; also entertained guests from passing stagecoaches. It was near roads connecting major Texas cities. Many roadside homes in early Texas were inns. The horseback traveler would shelter his pony in the barn, share family meals, get a room for the night. All stage lines depended on such accommodations-- for changes of horses, for passengers' meals, and for overnight stops. With travel difficult at best, such inns rendered a service of great public necessity. A frontier inn might even be a dugout, where the guests rolled up in blankets and slept on the floor. (Travelers sometimes had to sleep under a tree, so any sort of sheltering house was usually welcomed.) Most stage stops dispatched and received U.S. mail for the community. Towns originated at many stops. In early Texas, famous hotels included the Tremont, Galveston;The Old Capitol, Houston; several in Austin. (1967)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Round Top and Festival Hill — steps away
  A German village on the old La Bahía Road, named for a house tower, with an 1867 stone church, a Fourth of July kept since 1851 and a concert hall a pianist built without blueprints.
• Lake Somerville State Park and Trailway — 15 mi
  Two park units on an 11,000-acre lake between Austin and College Station, joined by a thirteen-mile trailway for hikers, cyclists and riders with primitive camps along the way.
• Monument Hill and Kreische Brewery State Historic Sites — 16 mi
  A shared tomb on the Colorado River bluff for the men of the Dawson fight and the black bean lottery, beside the ruins of a German stonemason's spring-fed brewery.
• Texas Wendish Heritage Museum — 18 mi
  A museum at Serbin of the Wends, a Slavic people from Lusatia whose congregation of nearly 600 crossed on the Ben Nevis in 1854, losing seventy-three to cholera on the way.

More markers nearby

• Round Top — steps away
• Round Top Community — steps away
• Bernard Scherrer — steps away
• Pochmann House — steps away