Old Dimmitt Building

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and here's how I tell it back to you. Some buildings in Texas just refuse to be one thing. The Old Dimmitt Building in Georgetown, Williamson County, is exactly that kind of building.

P. H. Dimmitt and Company put it up in 1901 as a hotel, and right from the start it was drawing in Texas pioneers, businessmen, statesmen, and writers.

Not a bad crowd for a place barely off the drawing board. Now, a hotel is one thing. But this building had bigger ideas.

Before long it was home to mercantile stores, and those stores became something more than a place to buy goods. They became a meeting place, the kind where families and friends from communities all across Williamson County would come together. You know the type of place, where you go in for one thing and end up staying half the afternoon.

Then came something Georgetown had never seen before. Its very first movie house, right there inside those walls. Think about that for a second.

The first time folks in Georgetown sat down in the dark and watched pictures move on a screen, it was in this building. That's not nothing. And the building kept turning pages.

An auto agency moved in after the movies. Then a drug store. Then a dental office.

Then a bus depot. Each one of those tenants brought a different crowd, a different kind of noise, a different reason for somebody to walk through that door. And through all of it, those Spanish arches held steady.

Those columns and turrets of native stone just stood there, patient as the county itself. In 1960, the Georgetown Savings and Loan Association remodelled the place, and here's the part that matters: they preserved those arches, those columns, those turrets. They didn't tear out the bones of the thing.

They kept them. Some buildings wear their history on the outside, right there in the stone, and the Old Dimmitt Building is one of them. A hotel, a gathering spot, a movie house, a garage, a drugstore, a dental chair, a bus stop, and still standing.

That's not just a building. That's Williamson County showing up for a hundred and some years and counting.

What the marker says

Associated with Texas pioneers, businessmen, statesmen, writers. Erected 1901 as a hotel by P.H. Dimmitt & Co. Later occupied by mercantile stores -- meeting place for families and friends from Williamson County communities. Georgetown's first movie house, then auto agency; later a drug store, dental office, bus depot. Remodelled 1960 by Georgetown Savings & Loan Association, preserving Spanish arches, columns, and turrets of native stone. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1965