Frontier Times Museum

The Frontier Times Museum is a collector's museum, and its building is part of the collection. When it was enlarged in 1933 its builders used native materials: stone, fossils, petrified wood and formations taken from local caves.

The collector was J. Marvin Hunter, a printer who had worked on sixteen papers, most of them four-page weeklies he set by hand, before he settled in Bandera in 1921. He published three historical magazines, the last of them Frontier Times, begun in 1923, and edited The Trail Drivers of Texas in 1920 and 1923. He promoted Bandera to tourists and in 1927 put his relics of Texas and the Southwest in a small house as a museum.

After Hunter's death the F. B. Doane Foundation bought the museum in 1960, restored the old building and added a gallery, and in 1972 it passed to Bandera County. By 1990 it held 30,000 items, from Native American artifacts and cowboy gear to clothes, weapons and household goods of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, along with a few curiosities, among them a collection of bells. A gallery shows local artists and craftsmen. The museum is a Blue Star Museum, free to active-duty military from Armed Forces Day to Labor Day.