There probably aren’t more than a handful of people in the world who qualify for the position, but Moody Anderson just needs to find one. He’s looking for someone to take his place as owner and proprietor of his amazing Country Life Museum in The Grove, Texas. Someone who truly loves Texas history.
The unique museum includes the entire downtown business district (minus one building) of The Grove, a turn-of-the-century (19th century, that is) agricultural town, complete with an authentically furnished bank, post office, general store, saloon, blacksmith’s shop, doctor’s office and more. Anderson has filled the town with fifty-plus collecting-years’ worth of antiques; now he’s looking for someone who will continue his 35-year restoration project with the same enthusiasm that has always characterized him. It’s a tall order.
Moody Anderson grew up on a farm that’s now inside the city limits of Round Rock. “I-45 runs through the fields where I picked cotton,” he says. The family also raised cattle, goats, hogs and sheep. His two brothers, his sister and he “all worked hard,” he recalls. After graduation from high school in 1947, he joined the Naval Reserve, then the Texas National Guard. He rose through the ranks as an administrative officer during his thirty-year career, retiring as a Lieutenant Colonel in 1979. But halfway through his National Guard career, he discovered his real life’s work. In the early 60s, he got the urge to start buying old blacksmith tools.
“I was becoming a sort of couch potato,” he recalls, “sitting around watching football games, and all. One Saturday, I saw a sign announcing a farm auction behind a barn in Elroy.” He attended, mostly out of curiosity, and decided to bid on some old blacksmith’s tools that nobody wanted. “Something told me I ought to start buying this stuff, that one of these days it was all going to be gone.”
His new interest became almost a compulsion, and Anderson began frequenting flea markets, auctions and estate sales. And he didn’t just buy blacksmith tools; old signs, coffee tins, boot jacks and countless other artifacts (even horse-drawn wagons and buggies) became part of his growing collection. It wasn’t long before he was in the antiques business full-time (first in Pflugerville, then in Austin), but he soon realized he had a problem: he didn’t want to sell his antiques! “My problem is that I fall in love with the junk,” he explains.
In 1971, Anderson stopped at the J.D. Graham (formerly W.J. Dube) General Merchandise store in The Grove on his way back from a buying trip to Gatesville (almost all his antiques have been purchased within 150 miles of his home in Austin). In one corner of the store stood a beautifully carved wood teller’s cage (with gleaming brass trim) which had served as the town’s bank from 1917 to 1932. He couldn’t resist.
Anderson tried unsuccessfully to purchase the bank, the meat counter and the post office, which occupied the opposite side of the building from the bank. Graham wouldn’t sell; Anderson finally gave up, and walked out to his truck.
One final idea crossed his mind, and he walked back inside to see if Graham would sell the entire building. After some hesitation, Graham agreed.
Within five years, Anderson had acquired the rest of The Grove’s downtown buildings: an 1877-era blacksmith shop, a mule barn, a defunct lumberyard, and an old well that sat in the middle of the main street. After extensive clean-up and refurbishment, he brought three truckloads of antiques to furnish the buildings. He purchased the inventory of the oldest drugstore in Texas (in Bastrop) and two old general stores (from two other tiny towns, Paige and Dale) to stock his general store. He re-created the original doctor’s office upstairs above the store, and turned the old lumberyard into the charming “Cocklebur Saloon.” Of course, many of his blacksmith tools now adorn the old Holcomb Blacksmith Shop, and old buggies are parked outside the store. He has since added two other historically appropriate buildings across the street from the store to complete what he calls the “Country Life Museum.” The museum has been featured in many magazine and newspaper articles, as well as T. Lindsay Baker’s book, Ghost Towns of Texas.
The Grove is not exactly a ghost town; there are still a few dozen people living in the immediate area, and the local Lutheran Church is still thriving. But it’s a town that could no longer support a traditional business district, and where a business district is no longer really necessary. Just a few miles northwest from the major commercial center of Temple, and deprived of many former farm “customers” by government land purchases for Fort Hood and Lake Belton, The Grove has simply settled into a quiet, rural existence, with good roads and plenty of pickup trucks to connect residents to not-too-distant towns.
Back in its heyday (around 1900), The Grove was one of the more prosperous towns in central Texas. Founded around 1859, the town became a social and commercial center for area farmers. It grew steadily for forty years, and boasted a population estimated at nearly four hundred in the 1890s. There were several churches and a good school, three general stores, two barber shops, a drug store, a café, a lumber yard, a blacksmith shop, a candy factory and an excellent community well. Being situated in the wild, wild west, the town had its share of cattle drives, shootouts and outlaws. Local legend has it that Sam Bass paid a visit to The Grove in 1878, shortly before he was shot and killed in Round Rock
While the population decreased slightly during the first three decades of the new century, business was good. In 1917, a new brick store was built and the Planters Bank was opened with a capital stock of $10,000. The Doolittle Championship Rodeo drew hundreds of spectators each Fourth of July, starting in 1928, but the Depression of the 1930s started the gradual decline of the spunky little town.
The bank closed in 1932, and when townfolk refused to cap the community well to allow construction of Highway 36 down the main street, the state built the highway a little to the north, bypassing the town. During World War II, the government bought up hundreds of ranches to make room for Fort Hood, and the town’s economic base was trimmed considerably. The school closed in 1948. In 1953, more nearby land was taken for Lake Belton when Belton Dam was built. The post office finally closed in 1996. Only a few large farms remain around The Grove today, and the town’s population is around 50.
Moody Anderson’s antiques won’t all fit in one little town; he and his partner, Terry Boothe have an extensive collection of Texana antiques and western artifacts in barns and houses around the Hill Country (that’s my excuse for including this story in the Hill Country magazine. The Grove is a little too far north and east to show up on my Hill Country map.) His reluctance to sell his treasures has led to some storage problems, but it also has led to a most intriguing business. He rents his antiques as props to filmmakers.
It all started when Cary White, production designer for the TV miniseries Lonesome Dove, walked in to Moody’s store on South Congress Avenue in Austin and spotted several items that would look good on his movie set. That first successful rental led to more than eighty such deals over the next twenty-odd years, including props for Redheaded Stranger, Second Hand Lions, Walker Texas Ranger, and the recent There Will be Blood.
Moody’s work has earned statewide publicity, and won him many notable friends. One of his proudest possessions is a picture of himself with Willie Nelson, who owns a little town himself, called Luck (west of Austin). The Country Life Museum has become a social and cultural center for The Grove, and residents crowd the grounds and fill the Cocklebur Saloon at Moody’s regular jamborees, where area musicians gather to play country music on the third Saturday of the month.
Chuck Allen is a singer/songwriter/guitar player from nearby Moody, who sounds quite a bit like Hank Williams senior. He has written a song called Cocklebur Saloon and included it on his latest CD; he is a regular at the jamborees. Tom Murphy is another; he’s written a song called The Grove. Ted Winkler and Jo Marie Riddle live at The Grove; Winkler, a descendant of one of the original settlers, plays the harmonica and Riddle sings. Other musicians come from Gatesville, Killeen, Temple and beyond.
Moody Anderson is over eighty, and a stroke a few months back made him start thinking about retirement. He hates the thought of selling his treasures piece-by-piece, but doesn’t know anyone who is able and willing to take his place. If you have a passion for Texas history and an eagerness to share it with others, you just might be the person he’s looking for. Come to The Grove some weekend or call him at 512-282-1215 to talk it over.
Read more articles from the Summer 2008 issue.