The Pampell Opera House

Pampell's carbonated drinks belonged to a fast-growing Texas trade. In 1891 twenty-nine bottlers and suppliers met in Dallas to form the Texas State Bottlers Protective Association, trying to stop the theft of one another's bottles. By 1900 Texas had 139 soda-water plants, making lemon, ginger, ale, vanilla, orange, sarsaparilla and raspberry, and seventy-seven ice plants, more than any other state. Coca-Cola bottling reached Dallas and Houston plants in 1902, and within three years twenty-nine Texas plants bought its syrup. By 1914 the state had 262 bottling plants.

What the plaque says

The Pampell Opera House Originally a frame structure, this building was completed about 1895. It housed the M. V. Gregory Hotel and Store when local merchant John L. Pampell (1871-1958) bought the site in 1901. He converted the second floor into a 450-seat auditorium and used the ground floor for the manufacture and sale of candy, ice cream, and carbonated drinks. The Pampell Opera House became a popular site for plays, concerts, traveling acts, and various civic functions, but by the 1920s movies began replacing the live shows. Traces of the opera house are still evident inside the building. (1981)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Schreiner Mansion — steps away
  The 1879 downtown home of Charles Schreiner, the Alsatian-born merchant, banker and rancher whose store and mohair trade built Kerrville.
• Treue der Union Monument — 15 mi
  An 1866 German-language monument in Comfort over the graves of Hill Country Unionists killed at the Nueces in 1862, its flag of thirty-six stars kept at half-staff.
• Old Tunnel State Park — 20 mi
  A railroad tunnel abandoned in 1942 that now shelters up to three million Mexican free-tailed bats, who fly out each evening from May through October.
• Frontier Times Museum — 22 mi
  A museum built of fossils, petrified wood and cave formations in Bandera, holding a printer-historian's collection of frontier relics and oddities.

More markers nearby

• Kerrville — steps away
• Kerrville Telephone Company — steps away
• Kerrville Mountain Sun — steps away
• Early Settlers of Kerr County — steps away