Hill Country Arts: Folk Fest, Jewelry & the Museum of Western Art

Somewhere between a rancher's fortune and a folk singer's guitar case, Kerrville became one of the great small-town arts capitals of Texas. This driving loop threads together four very different chapters of that story: the ranch south of town where the Kerrville Folk Festival has gathered musicians every summer since 1974, the O'Neil Ford-designed museum built to celebrate cowboy art, the garage where a young silversmith named James Avery started a jewelry company that's now a Texas household name, and a camp on the Guadalupe founded to give children a summer despite the era's polio epidemic. Threaded through it all is Kerrville's quieter tradition of homegrown ingenuity — the same town that hosts folk festivals also hosted the science that ended the screwworm's centuries-long threat to American livestock. NOTE: distance/duration and the tour center are provisional estimates — this tour's four curated stops still need their coordinates geocoded (see each stop's 'source' field) before these numbers are finalized.