Friday, April 26, 2024
BRIDGE STREET HISTORY CENTER
MELINDA JO RAY
Melinda Jo Ray is a longtime Granbury resident, writer, and a retired public school librarian. Her post retirement job has been as a writer of local history articles for a magazine, which formed the basis for her book “Limestone Legacies.” She is author of a novel, “Safe in the Arms of God,” based on the beginnings of settlement in the Granbury area.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The following is excerpted, with permission, from the book "Limestone Legacies" by Melinda Jo Ray, Copyright 2020, All rights reserved.
Mary Louise Faulkner Watkins was the granddaughter of David and Sudie Nutt. Mary Lou was the daughter of Mary Sue Nutt Faulkner and Louis Faulkner. Mary Lou left Granbury as a young woman to pursue a career in modeling.
She made a life in Dallas, working for many years with her brother, David Faulkner, an exclusive hat designer. She was a hat maker, model, published author, active churchwoman, and mother of three sons.
In 1967 she returned to Granbury to care for her ailing mother and elderly aunt, Euna. Mary Lou moved into the big but ramshackle old family home on Bridge Street and, shortly thereafter, undertook the restoration of that house to its former grandeur. In the beginning, she probably never dreamed that that restoration would be the spark that would kindle a fire of historic preservation and restoration that would transform a whole community.
A couple of years after Mary Lou returned to Granbury and began her project with the family home, another Nutt family member, her cousin Joe Louis Nutt, also moved back to town. Inspired by the success of her project, Joe and Mary Lou joined forces to purchase the Nutt Hotel on the square. The hotel had been sold out of the family a few years before.
The old hotel and the square around it were in sad shape. The years of wartime, economic depression, and the migration of many young people to the cities had taken their toll.
But there was an upside to that poverty and lack of development. Where others saw only empty storefronts, dilapidated buildings and broken dreams, Mary Lou and Joe saw a diamond in the rough, and a preservationist’s dream: historic buildings mostly unaltered from their original design and structure!
The fact that none of the buildings’ owners had been able to update and modernize their buildings made the Granbury Square, sitting as it did above the shores of a sparkling, rapidly filling new lake, a prime spot for future growth and development.
And there was the opportunity to “do it right,” to develop and preserve an authentic Victorian downtown square! “I thought the town should remain in the mainstream of history …, a living, breathing community,” is how Mary Lou described their vision.
The next step was to renovate the Nutt Hotel building. While Joe focused on his own big project across the square, Mary Lou set out to do just that.
She started with the outside of the building – restoring the stone work, removing the ugly evaporative coolers, and installing central heat and air. The downstairs was converted into a spacious lobby, which opened into what soon became the famous Nutt House Dining Room featuring homestyle cooking with a bakery in the other front room downstairs.
As the tenants upstairs moved on, she took that project room by room, first housing some small gift shops upstairs and then, when she was ready, opening the whole floor up as a small, quaint bed and breakfast inn. The Nutt Hotel was serving up hospitality to tourists and friends once again!
Mary Lou’s success and her and Joe’s staunch support and encouragement of other prominent citizens motivated others to start projects of their own. By 1974, Granbury’s town square was the first in Texas to be listed on the National Register of Historic Places as a historic district.
Beginning in 1986 with the publication of the Texas Historical Commission’s Main Street Handbook, Granbury’s historic preservation achievements and heritage tourism programs have been used as models throughout the state. “Brought back to life by a group of concerned and dedicated local citizens, Granbury is often referred to as Texas’ original ‘Main Street’ city,” the commission’s handbook states.
Mary Lou continued to oversee the operation of the hotel and dining room until 1983. At that point she sold the property to Tony Dauphinot, a Fort Worth developer, with the proviso that all operations remain basically the same until after her death. Always an advocate for both small-town business and small-town hospitality, she left an imprint on this small Texas town that will never be forgotten.
After her death in 2001, the town honored her memory with a bronze statue of her placed right across the street from the hotel!
It evokes warm memories of the days not so long ago, when Mary Lou would stand outside of the hotel donned in an apron and ring her signature bell, letting everyone know that dinner was on the table with her signature chicken and dumplings, hot-water cornbread, and buttermilk pie, and all were welcome!
www.bshc-granbury.org
