When the sky goes grey over the Hill Country, this is where to go. The Pioneer Museum occupies a three-acre site at the western end of Main Street, made up of around ten original buildings — a homestead, a smokehouse, a one-room schoolhouse, a barn, a log cabin — furnished much as the German settler families left them.
It’s run by the Gillespie County Historical Society, who also look after the Vereins Kirche, the little octagonal building standing on Marktplatz a few blocks east. Locals call it the Coffee Mill. It was the settlement’s first public building, serving as church, school and town hall at once, and what you see today is a careful 1935 reconstruction of the 1847 original.
Allow ninety minutes for the museum site. Most of the interest is inside the buildings, so a shower or two won’t spoil it, though the paths between them are open to the sky — take a jacket.
Around twenty minutes from the Haus, and it puts you at the quieter end of Main Street, where the shops and the coffee are noticeably less crowded than the tourist stretch.
