Little Hotel

Duane's take

The way the marker in Lampasas County tells it, here's the story of the Little Hotel. Now, most folks would finish building a grand hotel and call it a day. But in 1870, when the Gracy Hotel, later known as the Keystone, was finally completed, there was leftover stone just sitting there.

Good stone. Cut stone. The kind you don't leave lying in the dirt.

So somebody made a decision: build something with it. And that's exactly what they did. They called it, without a great deal of ceremony, the Little Hotel.

It was built for J. L. N.

Gracy and his bride, and the design was practical and sensible, the way things tend to be when Texans are doing the planning. Private apartment upstairs for the family. Rooms for travelers downstairs.

A place to live and a place to earn, all under one roof of pioneer stonework. The man who laid every one of those stones was Charles Green, a stonemason who already had a reputation in the area. He'd worked on the Gracy Hotel itself, and if that weren't enough, his hands also shaped the Coleman County Courthouse and Jail.

Charles Green was not a man who built small legacies. He was not a man who built anything that didn't last. And here's the thing about stone, friends.

Wood rots, timber burns, adobe crumbles back into the earth it came from. But stone, good stone cut by a craftsman who knows what he's about, stone tends to stick around. The Little Hotel is still standing in Lampasas, and it still carries the weight of all that pioneer heritage and craftsmanship the marker talks about.

Leftover stone from one building became the foundation of another family's whole life. Not a bad use of what was left over.

What the marker says

After the nearby Gracy (now Keystone) Hotel was completed in 1870, it was decided to use the leftover stone for the construction of a "Little Hotel." Built for J. L. N. Gracy and his bride, the structure contained a private apartment upstairs and rooms for travelers downstairs. It was constructed by Charles Green, a stonemason who worked on several other buildings in the area, including the Gracy Hotel and the Coleman County Courthouse and Jail. The Little Hotel now serves as a reminder of the pioneer heritage and craftsmanship of Lampasas. (1984)