About this tour
Few spots in Texas carry as much layered history in as small a footprint as the Japanese Tea Garden. It began as a 19th-century limestone quarry, sat abandoned once the cement company moved on, and was reborn in the early 20th century as a lush sunken garden — built and tended for decades by a Japanese immigrant family whose name was stripped from the site during World War II and restored only in 1984. This short walk covers the quarry's industrial origin, the garden's wartime renaming, the family's home turned restaurant, and a century-old outdoor theater built into the same old pit.