Runge Bandstand

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'm just the one drivin' you through it. Somewhere in Karnes County, there's a bandstand in Runge, Texas, and if you slow down long enough to look at it, you're lookin' at something that carries more than a little living inside its boards. The marker tells us it was originally built before 1900.

Before the turn of the century. Nobody's pinned down the exact year, and maybe that's fitting, because a place built for ice cream socials and Easter egg hunts probably didn't care much for paperwork. Then 1924 rolled around, and the structure got rebuilt.

That was a community effort, too. The Civic League was in on it. The Rungetex Brass Band pitched in.

And others, the marker says, which is the humble way old towns account for the neighbors who showed up with their sleeves already rolled. Now here's the part that lands quiet but lands hard. The older citizens of Runge, they've told stories about this place.

Good times, the marker calls them. Band concerts filling the air. Ice cream socials, which means the whole town out in the evening, probably a little sticky by the end.

Easter egg hunts, which means children, and laughter, and all the ordinary glory a small Texas town can muster on a spring morning. That bandstand held all of it. And then in 1970, the Ladies Auxiliary to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Post 9189, of Runge, Texas, rededicated it.

They made sure it would keep standing, keep being the thing it had always been. A place where the good times were real, and somebody thought they were worth remembering.

What the marker says

Originally built before 1900, this structure was rebuilt in 1924 by the Civic League, "Rungetex" Brass Band, and others. Many stories have been told by older citizens of the good times spent here at band concerts, ice cream socials, and Easter egg hunts. INCISE ON BACK: Rededicated in 1970 by the Ladies Auxiliary to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Post 9189, of Runge, Texas.