DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Now, if you're standing in Comal County looking at this building, you might think it looks like just another solid old brick commercial structure — and you'd be right, it is solid, it is old, and it is brick. But this corner has been busy since before most of us were a gleam in anybody's eye.
Back in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this very site was home to two drugstores and a bakery. Two drugstores. Before the bakery even got started.
Whatever it was about this spot, folks kept finding a reason to set up shop here. Then comes 1913, and a woman named Kathinka Clemens steps into the story. She constructed this building — not to live in, not to speculate on, but specifically to serve as a bakery for A.C. and Helen Plumeyer.
Now that's a particular kind of confidence in your tenants, building a whole structure around what they do. The Plumeyers set up their operation downstairs, and they weren't roughing it either — they made the second floor their residence, living right above the ovens and the flour and whatever magic was happening down below. The place was known as City Bakery, and it ran until 1926.
Thirteen years of bread and commerce, right there in the heart of Comal County. After the Plumeyers, the building kept on living. Various businesses moved through — among them the B&B Poll Parrot Bootery and Mode-O-Day.
And upstairs, from 1928 all the way to 1959, where the Plumeyers once slept, physicians A.J. Hinman and H.E. Karbach kept their offices.
Thirty-one years of doctoring in a space that used to smell like fresh bread. The building itself, through all of it, held together in brick and what historians call Craftsman design influences — a style that values honest materials and clean craft. Different times, different businesses, different people on that second floor.
But the same walls, the same bones, standin' right there for you to see today.
What the marker says
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, this site was home to two drugstores and a bakery. In 1913, Kathinka Clemens constructed this building to serve as a bakery for A.C. and Helen Plumeyer, who used the second floor as a residence. Known also as City Bakery, the business operated until 1926. Various businesses later occupied the building, including the B&B Poll Parrot Bootery and Mode-O-Day. From 1928 to 1959, the second floor housed offices of physicians A.J. Hinman and H.E. Karbach. The brick commercial structure exhibits influences of Craftsman design. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 2005