Ingram, Texas

Everything Ingram is known for

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Music in Ingram

Songs About Ingram

gadalupe days
gary p. nunn
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Artists From Ingram

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Rivers & Roads in Song near Ingram

Songs written about the waterways and highways that run near Ingram.

Guadalupe River 17 songs Interstate 10 36 songs Pedernales River 6 songs Blanco River 4 songs Frio River 13 songs

Musical Heritage

An Outdoor Stage on the Guadalupe RoadyGoat

You're on the banks of the Guadalupe River, at the Hill Country Arts Foundation in Ingram, home of the Smith-Ritch Point Theatre. This is an open-air stage that's been putting on shows here since the summer of 1959, the same year the Foundation itself got started. Musicals, plays, concerts — the river runs right past the seats, and it's part of every performance here. Some call it the longest-running outdoor theatre in Texas, a title earned one season at a time since 1959. The Hill Country has never been short on scenery, but this is one of the few places built to put a stage right in the middle of it. If the house lights are up tonight, there's a show going on under the stars, with the river for a soundtrack underneath the band.

RoadyGoat →

The Father of Country Music Chased Clean Air to Kerrville RoadyGoat

Kerrville was once a place sick people came to breathe, and in 1929 the most famous of them was Jimmie Rodgers, the Singing Brakeman and the man country music calls its father. Diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1924, when doctors believed dry air was the only real treatment, Rodgers came to the Hill Country for the climate and started building a hilltop home he named Blue Yodeler's Paradise. He moved his wife and daughter into the two-story house in the summer of 1929, flush with record royalties from the blue yodels that had made him a national star. The good times were short. The stock-market crash and his own lavish spending wrecked his finances while the disease wrecked his lungs, and he was forced to sell the Kerrville house and leave around 1931. Rodgers died in New York City on May 26, 1933, at just 35, two days after a final string of recording sessions. For a couple of years, though, the founder of an entire American music tradition called the hills above Kerrville home. (Source: Handbook of Texas; Texas Highways.)

RoadyGoat → · 6.2 mi away

The Road Goes On Forever, and It Runs Through Kerrville RoadyGoat

Texas songwriter Robert Earl Keen has called the Kerrville area home for decades, working from a ranch in these hills outside town. Keen built one of the most loyal followings in Texas music writing literate, story-driven country and folk, and his signature song, the outlaw ballad The Road Goes On Forever, first appeared on his 1989 album West Textures before becoming a Lone Star anthem covered far and wide. He's a Kerrville fixture as much as a touring star, the kind of resident songwriter who fits a town that has hosted the Kerrville Folk Festival since 1972 and treats songwriting as a local craft. Keen retired from full-time touring after a roughly 40-year run, but his roots in the Hill Country never moved. Driving these roads, you're passing through the country that shaped a writer whose whole catalog is built on Texas characters, long highways, and the kind of small-town detail you only get from living somewhere like this rather than just singing about it. (Source: Wikipedia; Texas Highways.)

RoadyGoat → · 6.2 mi away

History of Ingram

Why the Guadalupe Rises So Fast RoadyGoat

1956

Ingram sits in the heart of what hydrologists call Flash Flood Alley, and the geology explains why. The Hill Country is karst: thin soil over hard limestone on steep slopes, so rain runs off almost instantly instead of soaking in. Warm Gulf air riding up the Balcones Escarpment wrings out heavy rain that funnels into narrow river valleys. The Guadalupe basin has some of the highest flood discharge per square mile in the nation. Ingram Dam, an earthen structure about 20 feet high and 526 feet long, was built in 1956 to steady the river's flow. But engineering has limits. On July 4, 2025, after gauges nearby recorded roughly 10 inches of rain in hours, the Guadalupe just upstream at Hunt rose about 26 feet in around 45 minutes, putting Ingram under a flash flood emergency and delivering a catastrophic reminder of the runoff physics beneath this valley.

The Preacher Who Named the Town RoadyGoat

1879

Ingram carries the name of one man: J.C.W. Ingram, a Presbyterian minister who was also a merchant, postmaster, pharmacist, and at times a constable and sheriff. He set up a store and a post office on the Guadalupe River at the confluence of Johnson and Indian creeks, about seven miles west of Kerrville. Older histories, including the state's own handbook, date his six-acre purchase and store to 1879. Research by his own descendants, working from Kerr County deed records, instead documents the six-acre purchase in July 1883 and his appointment as postmaster on October 31, 1883. Either way, when a post office needs a name, the man running it usually gets to pick, and Ingram picked himself. The little river crossing grew into a town that still sits at that same creek-and-river junction today.

Cypress Shingles From the River Bottom RoadyGoat

1880

Before ranching and hunting leases defined this stretch of Kerr County, the Guadalupe River bottom offered a different kind of wealth: bald cypress. Early Ingram settlers farmed the valley and made shingles by hand from the plentiful cypress trees that lined the river, a rot-resistant wood prized for roofs. Grain was ground and cotton ginned at Sherman's Mill, which stood on the river between Ingram and Hunt to the west. Over time the economy shifted, first to sheep, goats, and cattle, then to deer hunting and imported exotic game on the surrounding ranches. The cypress groves that fed those first shingle-makers still shade the banks where the river passes through town, a quiet reminder of what the valley produced before the pastures took over.

Stonehenge II

1989

A 60-percent scale replica of Stonehenge built by retired oilman Al Shepperd in the Hill Country near Ingram, later relocated to the Hill Country Arts Foundation campus.

Henderson Cemetery

1862

Howard Henderson (1842-1908) came to Texas in 1857. He was a survivor of the Civil War Battle of the Nueces in 1862, in which he and other Unionists were ambushed by a Confederate force near the Nueces River. He later served as Texas Ranger. Henderson married Narcissa Turknett in 1866 and they settled near this site. In 1870, upon the deaths of their infant twin sons Thomas and Philip, they began a family burial ground which became known as Henderson Cemetery. Other family members and neighbors were also buried in the graveyard. (1990)

Historical Marker →

Sherman's Mill

1870

A pioneer Kerr County water-powered mill located near Kelly Creek-Guadalupe River confluence. It ground corn, sawed lumber, ginned cotton. Built in 1870s by John Sherman, it was in use until destroyed by flood in 1932. Sherman, his wife, and 8 children lived in house still standing nearby. (1972) Incise on base of marker: Marker Sponsor: A Sherman descendant, Dovie Turk Talley

Historical Marker → · 3.3 mi away

Butt, Howard Edward

1905

Howard Edward Butt, businessman, was born April 9, 1895, in Memphis, Tennessee, the son of Charles Clarence and Florence (Thornton) Butt . His father, a pharmacist, suffered from tuberculosis, so the family moved to Kerrville in the Hill Country of Texas, where the drier climate was believed therapeutic. To support the family, Florence Butt purchased wholesale groceries in 1905 with which she opened a small store in Kerrville later that year. Her cash resources at the time the store opened were sixty dollars. The family of five lived in rented rooms over the store. Howard, the youngest of three boys, helped his mother with the business, delivering groceries first in a child's wagon and later on horseback. He began to manage the store at age sixteen. He graduated as the valedictorian of Tivy High School in 1914. After hitchhiking to California for the summer, he harvested grapes to earn his return train fare and visited the home of his favorite author, Jack London, to whom he introduced himself. Before enlisting in the United States Navy for service in World War I , Butt chose for himself the middle name Edward. He served from 1917 to 1919, part of that time as aide to the commandant at the Great Lakes Naval Station. In 1919 he returned to Kerrville and joined his mother in managing the small family store. In 1921 he converted the store to cash-and-carry instead of charge and deliver, a move that was considered quite a gamble at the time. He attempted four expansions of the business–a feed store in Kerrville and grocery stores in Center Point, Junction, and Brownwood–all of which failed. Other attempts in such towns as Eagle Pass, Uvalde, and Crystal City also failed. On December 5, 1924, Butt married Mary Elizabeth Holdsworth of Kerrville ( see BUTT, MARY E. H. ). In 1926 he opened a store in Del Rio that proved successful. In 1928 he borrowed $38,000, moved to the Rio Grande valley, and purchased three small stores. He began calling his stores H. E. Butt Grocery Company in 1935 and changed the name to H-E-B in 1946. Butt expanded the grocery business in the Rio Grande valley and South and Central Texas, entering Corpus Christi in 1931, Austin in 1938, and San Antonio in 1942. Company headquarters moved to Corpus Christi in 1940. As one of the first to begin developing "one-stop shopping," he added a meat market, delicatessen, and bakery to his stores. By the 1950s H-E-B was the leading food retailer in South and Central Texas. By 1960 the company operated over eighty stores and its own food processing and distribution facilities. Butt's son, Charles C. Butt, succeeded him as president in 1971 and as chairman in 1984. Butt was a thirty-third-degree Mason and a Baptist deacon. He established the H. E. Butt Family Foundation in 1933, one of the earliest philanthropic foundations in Texas. He and his wife pioneered programs instrumental in eliminating tuberculosis in South Texas. They provided libraries and recreational facilities–swimming pools and tennis courts–to many South Texas communities, making seed-money gifts and urging municipal governments to implement these projects, particularly in low-income areas. He also began developing the H. E. Butt Foundation Camp in 1954. Under Butt's leadership, H-E-B regularly gave the maximum philanthropic contributions allowable under federal law. He maintained a strong sense of involvement in the communities that his businesses served. He was a member of the board of directors of Texas A&I college and the University of Corpus Christi. On March 30, 1972, the Texas Senate gave Butt a special commendation for his contributions to the state. He died at age ninety-five on March 12, 1991, in Corpus Christi. At the time of his death there were more than 170 H-E-B supermarkets.

Tsha Handbook → · 6.9 mi away

H-E-B

1905

H-E-B, a Texas-based supermarket chain, began in 1905 when Florence Thornton Butt moved her family to Kerrville, Texas. With a sixty-dollar loan, she established Mrs. C. C. Butt's Staple and Fancy Grocery, a one-room grocery store on the ground floor of the family home. In 1919 she turned management of the business over to her youngest son, Howard Edward Butt . Howard Butt, who delivered groceries from the store by wagon as a boy, went on to introduce major low-cost distribution innovations that eliminated middlemen and maximized profits when he took over the store's management. In 1922 he replaced the credit-and-delivery system with a policy of self-service cash-and-carry, thus increasing the turnover of goods and heralding a new era of shopping. He also renamed the business the C.C. Butt Cash Grocery and diversified his store by adding a meat market. Despite a lack of success at early attempts to expand into Central Texas, Butt was able to establish a successful enterprise at Del Rio in 1926, followed in 1927 by the purchase of three grocery stores in the lower Rio Grande valley. By specializing in low-priced goods the company survived the Great Depression so successfully that Butt was able to introduce employee picnics and a group life-insurance policy, move company headquarters to the Rio Grande valley , and expand to nearly twenty stores in Southwest Texas, with a gross business of $2 million in 1931. The company also organized a buying department and construction division. It began advertising with free gifts-dispensed in one case by throwing tagged live chickens, good for free groceries, and handfuls of nickels off a store roof-and later gave away cars, mink stoles, trading stamps, and cash prizes. In the mid-1930s, Butt again changed the name of his enterprise-this time to H.E. Butt Grocery Company. Under this name, he moved into manufacturing by acquiring the Harlingen Canning Company and opening a bakery in Corpus Christi in 1936. In 1940 company headquarters moved from the Valley to Corpus Christi to centralize distribution to its growing territory. In 1942, the year Butt installed air-conditioning in stores and introduced frozen foods, he also opened the first store under the name H-E-B, in San Antonio. During World War II the company's Harlingen Canning Company produced food for the armed forces, and won a War Food Administration "A" award for its food processing. Women served as store managers, and H-E-B became known for its interest in personnel development. A store that opened in Austin in 1944 became the fiftieth H-E-B. Grocery stores grew into supermarkets in the 1950s, and during that decade H-E-B introduced in-store fish markets, butcher shops, drugstores, and bakeries, though Butt's stores carried no beer or wine-Butt was a traditional Baptist deacon-until his son took over in the 1970s. The Texas Gold Stamp Company, a subsidiary, was organized in 1955 to produce consumer trading stamps, and the first retail support center, a manufacturing and distribution center, was opened in San Antonio in 1964. In 1971 Charles C. Butt, a graduate of the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce of the University of Pennsylvania, took over his father's position as president and chief executive officer of the company. Under his administration, the firm restructured its management and introduced generic goods. A milk plant opened in San Antonio in 1976, and the company introduced Futuremarkets, a further diversification that added in-store pharmacies, photo processing, and video rentals. During the 1980s, H-E-B stores began offering bulk foods and fresh flowers. The Company headquarters moved to the renovated army arsenal on the San Antonio River in 1985. In 1988 Forbes named H-E-B the thirty-sixth largest private company in the United States, with annual sales of $2 billion. At Howard Butt's death in 1991, the company, centered around its San Antonio Retail Support Center, had grown to 175 stores and twenty-one video stores

Tsha Handbook → · 6.9 mi away

Butt, Florence Thornton

1905

Florence Thornton Butt, whose grocery store was the first link in the H-E-B chain founded by her son Howard Edward Butt , was born in Buena Vista, Mississippi, on September 19, 1864, the daughter of John and Mary (Kimbrough) Thornton. She spent her youth in Buena Vista, where she often assisted her two pastor brothers in holding revivals. She later enrolled in Clinton College and, as the only female in her class, graduated with highest honors. Afterward, she taught school. In 1889 she married pharmacist Clarence C. Butt. The couple lived in Mississippi and Tennessee before moving to Texas in 1904 in search of a more suitable climate and better medical facilities to treat Clarence's tuberculosis. After a year in San Antonio, the family, which included their three young sons, moved to Kerrville. With her husband unable to work, Mrs. Butt became an agent for the A&P Tea Company, taking and delivering grocery orders door-to-door. She accumulated a small stock of groceries and invested sixty dollars to open the C. C. Butt Grocery on Main Street in Kerrville. The store was on the ground floor of a two-story building, which Mrs. Butt rented for nine dollars a month. She combined her business and domestic responsibilities by moving her family into the second floor of the building and using her sons as delivery boys. She continued to run the store until 1919, when her son Howard returned from the navy and took over as manager. She then concentrated on religious and civic efforts in Kerrville. She was a devout Baptist and a leader in the Eastern Star. She died at her Kerrville home on March 4, 1954, after suffering a stroke, and was buried in Glen Rest Cemetery. Her survivors included her sons Howard and Eugene. By the end of the twentieth century the H-E-B stores were the largest privately owned food chain in the nation.

Tsha Handbook → · 6.9 mi away

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Stonehenge II

Two retired Hill Country friends built a sixty percent scale replica of Stonehenge in a cow pasture outside Ingram in 1989 as a conversation piece. They added…
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Stonehenge II, Ingram, TX - Why Is This Here?

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Everything Near Ingram

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