Salado Rising
After a near-death experience at the hands of the highway that helped birth the tourist village, residents see signs of hope
Perhaps the best way to experience Salado, a writer from Southern Living once offered, is to stumble upon it. You’re traveling I-35 between Austin and Waco, and suddenly there it is — a charming patch of Texas’ past, right off the interstate.
The village grew up around Salado College, chartered in 1860, but the spring waters of Salado Creek had been attracting Native American tribes for hundreds of years before that.
In truth, Salado was a stagecoach stop before it was a town. “In the olden days, all roads led to Rome,” wrote the Temple Daily Telegram in 1908, “and before the days of the railroad, all roads led through Salado.”The pronouncement was both celebration and lament — recognizing at once the village’s evolution and, sadly, its decline at the hands of rail.
Salado had once been a major hub of activity, considered a cultural center given the presence of Salado College, and a mecca for recreation and relaxation because of its springs, clear creek and public greens. During the 1860s and ’70s, the village emerged as the most vibrant and rapidly growing community in Bell County and a popular stagecoach stop.
Stagecoach stopovers were critical, particularly in remote communities where they represented a lifeline between isolated pioneers and the rest of society. “For a time,” the Texas Almanac reports, “the stage lines provided the state’s only form of commercial transportation.”
Stopping every 10 miles on average, stagecoaches depended on way stations dubbed “stage stands,” where they’d find fresh horses, rest and replenishment. The benefit of these stopovers extended beyond stand owners: inn keepers, blacksmiths and merchants benefited as well.
Over the years, enterprising Salado residents capitalized on this opportunity, which gave rise to an emerging tourism industry and, connected with that, the Salado Hotel — now the Stagecoach Inn.
Constructed in 1860, the hotel and restaurant, over the decades, earned a degree of notoriety and romanticism. Sam Houston was run out of town after speaking against secession from the hotel’s balcony. Robert E. Lee stayed there, as did Jesse James. The walls of some rooms are covered with 19th-century newspaper articles.
By 1908, much had changed courtesy of the “iron horse” — namely, the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railroad, which bypassed Salado and instead laid its tracks in nearby Belton and Temple, thus growing those communities. Some Salado residents took a glass-half-full attitude. “Salado,” the Daily Telegram proclaimed, “has no railroad, no factories, no street car, no saloon, no opera — and none of the evils and lower class that accompany them.”
Still, in August 1908, Salado hosted a highly publicized barbecue to raise awareness of the village in the hopes a rail company would find the area appealing. And while the event attracted plenty of folks from nearby towns — many Temple residents, including the town’s band, made the trek by automobile despite the threat of stormy weather — no rail invitation resulted.
Residents couldn’t have imagined that the slow and clumsy auto that brought some visitors to the festivities would come to represent a profound shift in the country’s preferred mode of transportation — and in the village’s fortunes as well.
The popularity of the automobile, enhanced by advancements in engineering and improved roads, would ultimately level the playing field for towns like Salado, positioned along major thoroughfares. It took more than four decades for the village to experience a significant period of growth and revitalization, but when the boon came, it seemed worth the wait.
Which makes it all the more ironic that the same highway system that helped create the tourism community would ultimately be responsible, in part, for its undoing.
In February 1960, the Dallas Morning News announced, “A swank new motel is being built among the giant oak trees near Salado’s renowned Stagecoach Inn. Highway 81, from Dallas to San Antonio, had gone right through Salado for decades, but a new four-lane replacement has moved over and skirted the town. That highway now is an important segment of Interstate 35 that will run from the Rio Grande to Minnesota.”
Three decades later, Salado resident Thelma Fletcher described the change brought about by the addition of I-35 as one that altered the complexion of the village. She had reason to know. The Fletchers had sacrificed three acres of their property on behalf of the new thoroughfare, reports Carol O’Keefe Wilson in The Stage Stops Here: A History of the Stagecoach Inn. Many other Bell County property owners had done likewise.
Fletcher later attested to the breadth of the changes brought by the new interstate as farm- land was converted to blacktop and the hum of traffic shifted from the front to the back of her truncated property. She was grateful the children attending the red brick school- house across Highway 81 no longer had to contend with the heavy traffic that had long rumbled through town. Attention shifted west-ward, seemingly over night, once the interstate opened, as land that had long been farmland became highly visible, relevant and commercially appealing. “It became a different world,” Fletcher said.
The opening of the new Stagecoach Inn motel complex in October 1960 multiplied the changes brought by the interstate in the best way possible, attracting outside revenue and creat- ing jobs. The complex opened to enthusiastic reviews — one newspaper dubbed it “space-aged” and another described the property as “a tasteful blending of two different centuries.”The price for a single room per night was $10; a room with a novel oversized bed went for $15.
As expected, soon after the motel complex opened, Salado enjoyed an economic boom and revitalization. Just a decade prior, in the early 1950s, the sum of Salado’s commercial center had consisted of the Stagecoach Inn, a small grocery, a feed store, one barber and one beauty shop, a laundromat, a service station and auto repair garage, a hamburger hut, an antique bookstore and a post office.
But during the 1960s, the number of Salado businesses grew considerably, as did a host of activities that attracted tourists and other visitors. Salado was already a favored site for artists, but it became even more popular with people inter- ested in a variety of art forms. Galleries, antique stores and shops featuring home decor and jew- elry opened, primarily on Main Street. An annual meeting of the Scottish Clan, an annual art fair, art and history exhibits, a Christmas Stroll and an event called the Pilgrimage to Salado that included a tour of historic homes were added to the village’s yearly calendar of events.
The businesses and activities reflected the kind of cultural and artistic themes Salado residents held dear. Busloads of visitors and interstate travelers came calling, increasing over time, so that by the mid-’60s, Salado’s reputation was established. A new luxury hotel opening in Dallas in 1963 boasted that its chef was “the former head chef of the famous Stagecoach Inn in Salado.”
Dallas Morning News staff writer Frank Tolbert credited the Stagecoach owners, Dion and Ruth Van Bibbers, with “saving Salado from its former status as a ghost town.” Tolbert held that the restoration and success of the hotel had inspired local residents, who followed suit by restoring old homes along Main Street and else- where. As a result, Tolbert wrote, property along Salado Creek had appreciated dramatically.
Tolbert also recalled Dion Van Bibber schooling him during their initial interview. Van Bibber insisted on pronouncing the village’s name with a Spanish inflection — “Suh – LAH – do,” using a soft “a.”
Most Texans probably didn’t care how it was pronounced. They just wanted to go there. Until it became unfeasible.
WORKSPACES (clockwise from top left) Clay thrower Ro Shaw at his shop on Peddler’s Alley; 21 Main features unique home furnishings; taking a break at the Salado Wine Seller; owner Gail Allard creates a custom piece at Salado Glassworks.
Five decades after its establishment as a tourist haven, the village that once proudly referred to itself as “the jewel in the crown of Texas” had suddenly become something of a ghost town again.
“God forbid anyone has to go through what we did,” says current Salado city administrator Don Ferguson. “It was a tough pill to swallow for a community as vibrant, caring and open as this one.”
The decision by TxDOT in 2011 to recon- struct I-35 through the Waco District seemed like a no-brainer — and one that was met with only minimal objections by Salado officials. The reconstruction was necessary for a number of rea- sons, the foremost being the age of the highway — it was still the same structure originally built in the ’50s and ’60s. True, it had been reworked in some places and widened, but at the base it was old pavement never designed to carry the number of vehicles — including “heavy load” vehicles like tractor-trailers — that now travel it daily.
As such, the pavement had been over-stressed for years, and repairs were being required more frequently and more extensively every year. “Two-thirds of our traffic on I-35 here is passthrough — people getting on the highway in DFW or Austin/San Antonio and going through Waco to get to somewhere else,” says TxDOT’s Jodi Wheatley, public information officer for the Waco District. “Additionally, as much as 35 percent of the traffic consists of semis hauling big loads of everything you can imagine. Nobody imagined that back in the ’50s.”
Moreover, the road was still only two lanes wide through most of the district, with ever- increasing traffic, to a point where the entire route through the area had become a bottleneck. And since easy access to good roads brings in additional businesses and manufacturers, the traffic just kept getting heavier — a catch-22. “Transportation through the district was no longer just to get farmers and ranchers to and from market,” Wheatley says. “The reality is that more workers are commuting longer and longer dis- tances to get to work every day. So the roadway needed to be bigger and stronger.”
Project IB was thus born, with a goal of rebuilding the stretch of highway — roughly 3.4 miles long — to a minimum of three lanes in each direction, with continuous one-way front- age roads and reconstructed overpasses. Stronger pavement and updated design specs were used to accommodate the increased size and frequency of commercial vehicles, as well as the increased need for new safety elements to help keep drivers safe as they travel.
But the proposed completion date for Project 1B — August 2015 — came and went, and with it the dwindling fortunes of a village almost entirely dependent on highway traffic. Extensive signage, posted by TxDOT to indicate the construction zone, ended up having a disruptive effect, discouraging the sorts of travelers who form the economic lifeblood of such a community. “When you have a tourist-based economy,” Ferguson says, “blocking off the town is like blocking off the river in New Braunfels. We rely on visitation, but it was very difficult to find your way off the highway.”
Salado Mayor Skip Blancett claims that nearly 90 of the village’s 120-plus businesses closed during reconstruction, including the Stagecoach Inn, dealing a near death blow. Blancett published an angry letter, directed toward the James Construction Group, the contractor assigned by TxDOT to the project, saying residents were “emotionally and mentally exhausted,” and that those few business owners who remained were “spending their last pennies trying to stay in busi- ness.”
Salado felt betrayed by TxDOT and its promises of a relatively orderly transition, and began calling in political favors. Congressman John Carter, who serves the district, blamed delays on the contractor and says he had no qualms bringing pressure to bear on TxDOT as a result. “It’s my job to fight for my neighbors, and that’s what I did,” Carter tells Authentic Texas. “I stepped in to speed up construction, but I also wanted the contractors to understand the damage they did to the Salado area — to prevent something like this from ever happening again.”
TxDOT’s Wheatley has conceded that “we weren’t happy with the progress” of Project 1B. But she also emphasizes the complexity of the work.To keep the interstate at least partially open at all times — a monumental feat — contractors have to reconstruct the structure piece by piece, building a new frontage road, then destroying the old one, then building new highway lanes, then destroying the old ones — all in a tight space and under a variety of restrictions.
The payoff is undeniable: once completed, residents enjoy the fruits of a newly rebuilt stretch of highway.
Still, when the proposed completion date arrived, nearly 40 percent of the work hadn’t yet been completed. “One day you’re going to love I-35,” a TxDOT sign just south of Salado read during the disarray. “Until then, be careful.”
“Reconstructing a stretch of highway is like living in your house while it’s undergoing major remodeling at the same time,” Wheatley says. “But we did whatever we could to help the situa- tion. We contacted the village and business own- ers to let them know this was coming. We held meetings and gave presentations to city groups. We added lots of extra directional signs to guide motorists. And we made sure to maintain access to businesses at all times.”
Those able to remain open, that is. When the Stagecoach Inn closed in 2015, the village had lost its biggest draw — and, in some respects, its identity. “The Stagecoach has always been a landmark for the community — and a magnet,” Don Ferguson says. “When it went down, it signaled that the community was hurting and no longer the way it once was.”
But just as the situation seemed bleakest, new developers purchased the inn and under- took a year-long restoration of the property that coincided with TxDOT completing the essential elements of Project 1B.
By Thanksgiving 2016, Wheatley says, the contractor had achieved “substantial completion.” And by the time the Stagecoach Inn restaurant reopened in June 2017 — the hotel is scheduled to reopen this April — “Structurally, everything was done,” Wheatley says. “The main lanes, access roads and overpasses were in place. We still had to complete landscaping and side- walks, and we had to install permanent signage.”
And what would become of all that tempo- rary signage that defined the area during recon- struction? Ferguson chuckles. “Recently, I was on the phone with TxDOT,” he recalls, “and they asked what else they could do to help the situa- tion. I said, ‘How about hauling all that signage out of here?’ Seeing those signs every day was a reminder of what we’d been through — sort of like post-traumatic stress. The next Friday, the signs were gone.”
With the Stagecoach Inn restaurant back in business, the village is slowly regaining its footing. Local businesses that weathered the crisis are experiencing an uptick, and there’s been some new commercial development in town. Moreover, Salado is making a concerted effort, through media and marketing partners, to get out the message that Salado is again open for business.
Finally, as a reminder of its shared struggles, TxDOT has worked with Salado to produce two works of art — a mural and a gateway sign consisting of a glass-blown structure — that now greet travelers to the village.
Today those travelers exit off a newly designed stretch of I-35 that holds the promise of a brighter future.
“We had our best Christmas season in years,” Ferguson says. “Spring will tell, but all the numbers seem to point in a positive direction.”
