Brick Store House

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'm gonna give it the full treatment it deserves. Out here in Colorado County, there's a brick store house with a story that runs deeper than most folks stop to notice. It starts in 1840, when a physician from Virginia named Thomas W.

Harris took ownership and set up shop. Now think about that for a second. Eighteen forty.

This building was already doing business before Texas had been a state for even a handful of years. Harris held on to the place clear through to 1867, which means he saw some history roll through that front door. Wars, booms, the whole churning lot of it.

Then in 1867, William and Mary Pinchback bought the property and added their names to its long chain of keepers. The building passed next to Kasper Vogel in 1875, and then to Bertha Wagner in 1878. Now here's where the story gets interesting, because the Wagner name didn't just pass through.

It held. The Wagner heirs still own the property to this day. And somewhere along the line, in 1912, a grocery operation called Feherenkamp moved in and has been there ever since.

A physician from Virginia starts it all in 1840. Families come and go. And more than a century later, the same building is still standin', still open, still doing what it was built to do.

Some buildings are just stubborn like that. The good kind of stubborn.

What the marker says

Owned and occupied 1840-67 by Thomas W. Harris, a physician from Virginia. Bought by William and Mary Pinchback (1867), Kasper Vogel (1875), Bertha Wagner (1878), and still owned by Wagner heirs. Since 1912 store has housed Feherenkamp Grocery.