Otto Reinke Building

Duane's take

The official marker tells it this way, and I'm just here to pass it along. Now, Round Rock had a moment in 1876. The railroad arrived, and the town started expanding.

Three years after that, somebody put up the Otto Reinke Building. 1879. Victorian Italianate walls, the kind that say this town means business. And for the decades that followed, those walls saw plenty of it.

Stores set up shop inside. A physician hung a shingle. Restaurants fed hungry folks.

One tenant came, another went, and the building just kept standing there, solid as ever, doing what old buildings do best, which is outlasting everyone's expectations. Then came 1963. Fire got inside and gutted it.

The walls, those stubborn Victorian Italianate walls, they held. And that's where the story takes its turn. An architect named Martin S.

Kermacy and his wife Evelyn looked at what was left and decided the walls were worth saving. They built a modern interior right inside them. Old bones, new life.

The Otto Reinke Building, 1879 to the present, has been a store, a doctor's office, a restaurant, a ruin, and a comeback. Not bad for a stretch of Williamson County real estate.

What the marker says

Erected 1879, three years after Round Rock expansion began at railroad's arrival. Some successive tenants included stores, physician, restaurants. After it was gutted by fire in 1963, architect Martin S. Kermacy and wife, Evelyn, built a modern interior within the Victorian Italianate walls.