Bandera — Frontier Times Museum

J. Marvin Hunter was a journalist, which means he knew how to collect evidence of a world disappearing in front of him. In 1933, he opened the Frontier Times Museum in Bandera — a town that had already lived several lives as a cattle-drive crossroads on the edge of the Hill Country's limestone breaks. What he assembled over time grew to more than 40,000 artifacts: tools and relics of frontier Texas, objects from Native American material culture, and the accumulated memorabilia of a cattle-drive era that was recent enough, at the time, that people still remembered the smell of it.

The Hill Country was always a borderland — geographically between the American South and Southwest, historically contested ground between settlers and the people who had been there first. The Frontier Times Museum holds that tension without resolving it. Hunter's instinct was preservation, not curation. Go because the collection is the record of people who built something hard in difficult country, and someone thought it worth keeping.