Visit a train depot and a saloon in a small town that might not stay small for long

BERTRAM, Texas — My first glimpse of Bertram emerged as if from a dream.

Several years ago, a road-trip buddy and I sought out the headwaters of the South Fork San Gabriel River. It rises near the happily named hamlet of Oatmeal in Burnet County.

Traveling to Oatmeal from the southwest, we had taken narrow FM 1174 across the rugged back country that divides the Colorado and Brazos river basins.

We crossed the river's fork — a mere rivulet at this point — at FM 243 near Mt. Zion Church, not long after the steep wooded hills flattened into green pastureland.

Proud of having finally visited Oatmeal — a name that had for decades stood for "tiny, remote Texas" to us city folk — we toddled dutifully up 243 and bumped into Bertram, a larger town that we didn't even know existed.

A former cotton center on the Austin and Northwestern Railway, Bertram had clearly once been a place. Substantial masonry structures dotted a wide downtown on both sides of the railroad tracks. Quiet streets branched off into shady residential districts.

I was smitten.

I thought of Bertram often since then, and returned in July during a day trip to Burnet County that included stops in historic Marble Falls and Burnet.

Catch a show at the Globe Theatre

Bertram is by no means uncharted, but to many Texans, it remains obscure.

The best way to start your love affair with this town is to visit the Globe Theatre, a former movie house that is now a crackerjack music venue that still shows movies on occasion.

Zach Hamilton and Lance Regier took over and renovated the 1935 theater at 132 W. Vaughn St. At one point under a previous owner, the city had threatened to condemn the place.

Two years ago, Hamilton's sister, Emily Jones, and her husband, Jesselee Jones, who come with extensive backgrounds in the music business, bought the theater and started running it. They had both enriched their love of music — and the music scene — in Austin, then Nashville.

"We've always been a musical family," Emily Jones says. "My great-grandmother played piano in church. My grandmother played piano all over and in nightclubs. Along with that, my dad was a huge music lover, everything from classical to rock 'n' roll to country to gospel — and everything in between."

The Globe seats about 200 guests on the main floor and another 50 or so in the mezzanine.

Upcoming Globe acts include Dale Watson, Band of Heathens and Rodney Crowell. In addition to music, the theater owners also exhibit movies.

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Listen, I've written a book-length thesis on historic Texas theaters and rarely have I seen a small-town venue so perfectly renovated for modern use. It is warm, intimate, alive. The tired old performer in me wanted to hop up on the stage and stretch my arms out toward the imaginary audience in the balcony.

Jones says the Globe attracts music lovers from Houston, Austin and Dallas, but also from this slice of Burnet County.

"You gotta give people something to do," she says, "or they will go somewhere else."

It seems to have become a passion project for everyone involved.

"I always had an itch for preservation," Jones continues. "Change is inevitable, but the only way to protect and preserve is to teach the history to the people moving into the area. To educate and earn their respect so they will be receptive to what we are trying to do."

Make it a night on the town at Flanigan's

Every town needs a good saloon. Bonus points if the bar is directly related to a local distillery and winery.

And every good saloon needs a friendly bartender or two.

Flanigan's Texas Distillery and Winery, at 330 N Lampasas St. in Bertram, benefits from two such guardian spirits in the persons of Kevin and Dana Flanigan.

The couple's signature adult beverages are made across Lampasas Street in another historic structure. The saloon occupies a 1904 building that had once housed a hardware store, and later served as the movie set for hotel scenes in the 1998 crime film, "The Newton Boys," co-written and directed by Richard Linklater.

One can detect some surviving decorative elements, including a long bar, from the movie, which was set in the early 20th century.

The saloon is tall and deep, divided between a U-shaped balcony and a spacious main barroom. The Flanigans purchased it in 2014.

"I was a surgeon in Joplin, Missouri, and we were interested in distilleries as social experiences," Kevin says. "We visited the Copper Run Distillery in Branson and learned the process. We thought: 'Hey, we can do this.' Our first batch came out like fine single-malt Scotch."

Today, they distill five products — poteens, whiskeys, grappas — all made with Texas ingredients and bearing appropriate Texan names.

The Flanigans envisioned a relaxing place, not a noisy a sports bar, and they lean heavily on the Irish theme. If asked, Kevin will repeat some truly toe-curling Irish jokes.

The pandemic, however, was no joke.

"It was rough, very rough," he says. "We made hand sanitizer that we distributed for free to the police, fire department and post office. I don't know how other people survived."

Dana, who grew up in Cedar Park, remembers trips to the former hardware store, as well as the 1907 general store and lumber yard, a onetime gambling hub, across the street.

"It was out in the middle of nowhere," she says. "I always thought the buildings were so beautiful. One day, we met a friend in Bertram and saw the 'For Sale' sign. That's all we needed."

She says that Flanigan's attracts a healthy mix of tourists and locals.

"It's a chance to step back in time," she says. "I'm very happy we can do that here."

Catch a train at the Bertram Depot

I must make a mortifying confession: I have never boarded the historic steam train from Cedar Park to Bertram and Burnet.

Always wanted to ride. Always intended to ride.

To make matters worse, my good friend and former American-Statesman colleague, Ben Sargent, has volunteered for the Austin Steam Train Association for as long as I can remember. His stories about the train are priceless.

"Some years back, I was shepherding a film crew from National Geographic Channel on the train," Sargent recalls. "The train was going from Cedar Park to Burnet, but they were only going as far as Bertram.

"On our way, I told the head guy I would need to count on them for transportation back to Cedar Park and my vehicle. Might be a problem, he said, as his crew was going somewhere else after Bertram. 'But it's OK,' he says, 'we'll call you a cab.'"

Sargent: "Haven't been to Bertram before, have you?"

When Sargent heard that I was visiting Bertram in July, he handed me an invaluable booklet, "Along the Granite and Iron Route: A Guide to the Hill Country's Historic Excursion Railroad."

I have discussed the old Austin and Northwestern Railway in previous columns, but this published guide takes the reader step by step along the line to all the little habitations and rail-era remnants that one might see during an excursion.

It includes a swell photograph of Bertram residents crowding around the town's original depot in June 1957 to meet a special train sent by the Southern Pacific to commemorate the town's 75th birthday.

The town was established in 1882, when the community of San Gabriel in Williamson County was moved two miles northwest to the new railroad.

It was named for Rudolph Bertram, an Austin businessman and the largest stockholder in the Austin and Northwestern.

"A post office opened in 1882, and by 1891 the town had an estimated population of 150, a cotton gin-gristmill, three general stores, a grocer, a blacksmith, a shoemaker and two wagon makers," reports the Handbook of Texas Online. "After 1900, Bertram was a shipping point for cotton, cattle and wool. In 1928, a record 11,624 bales of cotton were ginned in the town. In the early 1930s plummeting cotton prices during the Great Depression caused the town's population to decline from a high of 1,000 in 1929 to 550 by 1931."

If the main products from Bertram were cotton, cattle and wool — along with some inevitable cedar fence posts — why then was it called the "Granite and Iron Route"? Because industrialists in the capital city were eager to mine and quarry the underground riches of the Hill Country. Seams of iron were indeed discovered in Llano County and lead in Burnet County, but they proved unprofitable.

The granite, however, was — and still is — a gift to the state. Quarried at Granite Mountain near Marble Falls, it has not only clad the state Capitol, but the Galveston Sea Wall as well as various courthouses and jetties.

The steam train, which stops here, has turned into an unforeseen bounty for Bertram. The depot, right in the middle of town, is a looker. It was built in 1912 by the San Antonio & Aransas Pass Railroad for Orange Grove, Texas. Painted yellow, it was moved to Bertram in 1998 and neatly resembles the original station on the site. Volunteers worked hard to make it into an authentic country depot.

"On July 24, 1882, 200 passengers boarded an excursion train in Austin for a scenic ride to the proposed new settlement," reads the guidebook, "and 77 lots were sold that day."

Residents of the town of San Gabriel moved 13 homes and two stores by oxen to the new spot. Moving required two days, and some families continued to live and cook in their homes during the move.

At the peak of the cotton boom during the 1920s, Bertram hosted four gins and a block-long storage dock along the tracks. Another block held the cattle pens that survived more than a century of use. The cattle were shipped to stockyards in Fort Worth and Houston.

My Texas history day trip to Burnet Country was almost done. Taking Texas 29 from Bertram toward Liberty Hill, while rolling past gargantuan suburban high schools and burgeoning suburban shopping centers, I realized that Bertram will not remain a diamond in the rough for long.

"People are coming from everywhere," says Lori Ringstaff, vice president and business development officer for R Bank and president of the Bertram Chamber of Commerce who grew up near Oatmeal. "They want to get back to a little slower paced life in a small town that comes with a certain charm."

It will soon be easier to get there from Austin. After all, the expanded version of U.S. 183 is already tickling the outskirts of Liberty Hill.

All we can hope is that the pioneering spirits who have staked out this historic town will be able to preserve its character.

Michael Barnes writes about the people, places, culture and history of Austin and Texas. He can be reached at mbarnes@statesman.com

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Catch a train, a show or a night in historic Bertram, Texas