About this tour
Gruene almost died. A single family's cotton empire — mercantile, gin, dance hall, and the farm hands' school — collapsed when the boll weevil wiped out the crop in 1925, and the town nearly vanished along with it. What saved it, a half-century later, was the same thing that built it: Gruene Hall, the dance hall Henry D. Gruene put up in 1878, never stopped operating even as everything around it went quiet. This two-block walk covers the whole rescued district — home, gin, mercantile twice over, and the hall itself, now widely credited as the oldest continuously operating dance hall in Texas.