Captain Schreiner's Kerrville: Merchant, Rancher, Banker

Charles Schreiner arrived in Texas as a boy, rode with the Texas Rangers as a teenager, fought through the Civil War, and then, in 1869, opened a general store in a small Guadalupe River town — and more or less built modern Kerrville out of it. By 1900 he owned 600,000 acres, ran one of the first wool-and-mohair warehouses in Texas, founded a bank, and endowed the college that still bears his name. This driving loop through downtown Kerrville visits the buildings his family raised — a Victorian mansion built as a wedding gift, a National Register commercial block, a Beaux Arts church his community helped fill — and traces how one merchant's ambition became the shape of an entire Hill Country town.