Gruene General Store

Anything from a rat skin to a ranch. This was the motto of the original Green Mercantile, a store that served everyone and everything in green during the early 19th century. Today, it is known as the Green General Store. Founded by HD Green in 1878, the store was constructed to serve the families who were working as sharecroppers in green's 8,000 acre cotton farming empire. For a time, it was a stop for weary travelers located on the brown and tarbox stagecoach route. Stagecoaches would stop here for provisions and to water their horses, preparing for the b HD Green had a well-known reputation for buying and selling items of all sorts. An old legend suggests that one day a prospector approached HD saying that he'd heard he would buy anything, so the prospector asked HD would he give him for a rat skin. HD replied, oh, about a dollar, which was a significant amount of money back then. The prospector returned with 30 rat skins, and HD purchased all of them. Thus the motto, anything from a rat skin to a ranch was born. The green l The store sold longleaf pine, which functioned as the primary building material for tenant farmers' homes and barns. It stood in green until the mid-1970s. Today, all the remains of the l The general store provided food, clothing, household necessities, farming implements, and tobacco, all of which could be purchased inexpensively and if necessary bought on credit until harvest time each year. In 1890, a few years after HD became the first town postmaster, the general store began to function as a post office, but HD's new mercantile would soon take over. The wooden general store building was originally constructed at the northwest intersection of the town, where the red brick mercantile stands today. When HD decided to expand the business in 1904, the general store was moved across the street to make room for the new mercantile building. Logs were positioned beneath the structure and mules slowly hauled the clapboard building across the street, hoofs by hoof. Once the building had safely reached the other side of the road, the movers realized there would be no easy way to rotate it, so the back door became the front. And although they have been sealed, today you can still see the original front doors at the rear of the building. It's r HD saw there was money to be made on booze, and he invested in a distillery for HD's Green River brand whiskey, which he advertised as the whiskey without a headache. He produced it by the barrel and sold it for an enterprising 10 cents a shot. After Green became a ghost town in the 1920s, it would be almost 50 years before the general store would once again welcome customers through its doors. Although the price of a drink has changed a bit, the building for the most part remains in its original state, and with its historic setting and ambiance of yesteryear, the Green General Store ranks as one of the top 40 places to visit in Texas.