History

History of Hotel Limpia | 1953-1989

In His Own Words | Joe Duncan

“My father, J.C. Duncan, bought the Hotel Limpia from Roe Miller, Sr. in 1955. The lobby had burned in 1953. Mr. Miller bought the hotel just after the fire. I am not sure what he did with building or what his plans were at the time. Daddy, was still employed on the family ranch north of Fort Davis but he and my mom were living in town, convenient for their first child, Jim, to go to school. The drought was the worst in decades and he saw a future in town, not at the ranch. His plans were to remake the old Limpia into a rental building for Harvard University Radio Astronomy. Harvard was new in Fort Davis at the time and he saw a need for office and apartment space for them. He renovated the burned lobby into their west Texas office headquarters and turned the hotel rooms, which were not too badly damaged, into apartments for the radio astronomers. For the next 20 years this was most likely the best use of this building. Tourism had not materialized yet in the town and the “summer swallows” from Houston and Galveston had quit coming to the area in the ‘40s due to the evolution of air conditioning. These wealthy people could stay in their nice homes in south east Texas for the sultry summers there. No need to come to the Davis Mountains anymore.

In 1959 the third of three kids, I was born. For some reason my father sold the building back to the Millers. Harvard was still occupying the hotel and extending 5 year leases. It was a good space for them. Things on the property really did not change again until 1972 when my father decided he wanted it all back again. The fort was now a national historic site, Indian Lodge and the state park had just been renovated and expanded, McDonald Observatory was about to build a second major telescope. Daddy felt that tourism was soon coming back to Fort Davis. At this time in his life he was superintendent of Fort Davis schools and my mother was a school teacher. He also taught civics in high school. He challenged his civics class to renovate downtown Fort Davis with models of what the town could be like as a tourism draw. The students had to take each building around the town square and make them look as models more attractive for tourism. He was really envisioning what he could do with it all. His students made models of the bank, the Union, the hotel, the drug store, the Stone Village all spruced up with a look of the old west. J. C. bought back the Limpia building later that Fall of 1972 for $30,000.

His plan started with the renovation of what is now the Limpia Bistro in the spring of 1973. He convinced my mother to retire from teaching and establish a gift shop in that building. The name was Sutler’s Store named after the Sutler’s Store at the fort in the 1880’s. Mother really loved sitting and reading books all day and was kind of inconvenienced when the occasional customer would come in. My grandmother a true west Texas ranch woman always said, you are never going to sell anything out of that store (that is a waste of your all’s time). The store did well. The next summer my father doubled the store size by adding on to the back of Sutler’s Store, what is now the bar area of the Bistro. He planted the two Sycamore trees that are now 80 feet tall providing shade, established the grass and planters in the courtyard making it more of a tourist destination.

That Fall he bought the Limpia Annex (what he later renamed Sutler’s Apartments and later Lanna and I renamed the Limpia Suites building, now the Orchard House). There is no record of the exact time the Annex was built. I have asked everyone I can think of and even gone to the courthouse to see if there was a record of any debt recorded on the building. There wasn’t debt recorded prior to the 1950’s. My guess that it was built in the early to mid 20s, based on the history of the actual hotel and demand for more rooms. I do think it was added by the Walter Millers who were part of the Union Trading Company that built the Hotel Limpia in 1913. They lived in the hotel until about 1937 when Mr. Miller died (Kimball Miller’s grandfather). The hotel needed additional rooms and this building was added to be used in the summer time and closed in the winter.

Anyway, the Annex was sold off from the Hotel Limpia sometime in the 1950’s and became a motel of its own, The Limpia Valley Motel. The Prudes owned it during this period. John Robert and Betty lived there I remember into the mid-1960’s. I believe John Robert sold it to somebody else before we bought the Annex in 1974. When we bought the place it was basically just like it had been built in the 1920’s. A wide hallway running down the middle with lots of smaller rooms opening into the hallway. Louvered doors and transoms were for the air flow for the building for the “summer swallow” guests it was built for. I can remember it all today just like it was then.

Daddy thought that the building would be better used as apartments and started a major reconstruction project. He built in the wide hallway and combined the rooms to make 8 large apartments. He built a pitched roof on the building and redid the porch to go completely around the building. He spent a lot of money at the time renovating the annex. Central heating and air conditioning for each apartment, new bathrooms, 8 kitchens, nice brown paneling over the stucco walls, automatic sprinkler systems for the landscape, carports for the tenants. We opened as Sutler’s Apartments in the Fall of 1974. Pat and Kimball Miller were our first tenants. They had just moved back to town that summer and needed a place to live. They took the largest three bedroom apartment on the south end of the building. Other tenants were the wealthy lady from San Antonio, Gretchen Glasscock who was starting Glasscock Vineyards at the foot of Blue Mountain, local old ladies (widows), and misc. people leased the other 6 apartments. The remake of the building was a success.

In 1975 Daddy bought the triangle property where The Porch building now sits. I don’t think anything had ever been built on that property at the time. The Union Trading Company owned it in the early hotel days and kept their livestock (chickens, pigs, goats), supply for the Hotel Limpia kitchen, on that property. His plan, after 2 years of success of Sutler’s Store, was to add a full blown drug store on the property. Why a drug store, I don’t know. The Fort Davis Drug Store across the street had fallen on hard times. He could have bought it and saved a lot of money. Anyway, this new building concoction opened for business July 4th weekend 1976 (the bicentennial), but, it did not turn out as a drug store. Somehow during construction it metamorphosized as The Boarding House Restaurant. His long term plan of owning a full service historic hotel was getting closer to the making!

Daddy loved the restaurant business. The our family hated it! He and his sister had a small café across from the fort in the mid-1960’s called the Lantern Inn. They nearly worked themselves to death during that four year era. Mother made a gazillion pies while raising three kids and teaching school. So The Boarding House was now his latest restaurant dream come to true. He worked the place all day and all night, again just about killing himself.

In the fall of 1977 he started renovations of the original hotel building. Harvard’s last 5 year lease expired in 1973, the year we opened Sutler’s Store. He had other plans for the old hotel building. By the summer of 1978 it was completely renovated and reopened as Sutler’s Limpia Hotel. Again, he was working even harder to make the business a success.

At this point he had every piece of the puzzle in place except for one component. Fort Davis had not had a bar since prohibition and this is what he felt “Sutler’s” needed. The Fort Davis church crowd thought his idea was horrible and we were all going to hell. We being good Presbyterians though somehow made it an outside chance to make it happen. He came to me as an energetic 19 year old and college student (the drinking age was 18 then) to help him devise the plan. He said I will send you to bartending school in Dallas if you will come back open the bar, to be named Sutler’s Club. I took the challenge. Daddy went door to door around the drinking crowd of town and got 50 names that would support having a private club at his new restaurant. It took some work but by the summer of 1979 we opened Sutler’s Club. I was to be the bartender and I got to hire the cocktail waitress (we only would need one). My hire was Lanna, later to become my wife and later who with me would buy the business from the family 12 years later. We ran the bar for two summers. Lanna was a school teacher in Odessa and I was still in college at North Texas. This was a great summer job for both of us in ’79 and ’80.

There was another building downtown that Daddy had his eye on at the time, The Dumas Building (we later renamed it Limpia West) across the street. He always was trying to get his children involved in the business. He convinced my brother Jim and me to purchase this building in the Spring on 1979 for future use of the business. He felt that once the hotel was up and going we would need more rooms and he would lease it from us. The upstairs portion of this 1925 building had never been finished out for anything. The Dumas’ had recently renovated the downstairs (where Javelinas and Hollyhocks is now) into office retail space.

The summer of 1980 my father started having muscular issues with his hands. Next it was his shoulders. Later his legs. He was diagnosed with ALS that fall. He was the catalyst of the business. He died in September of 1982. My mother was not capable of operating the business and still despised the restaurant. We sold the business in March of 1983, however she financed it. It all came back to her two years later. We leased the business. Nobody could make a go of it.

Finally in August on 1990, Lanna and I had our best friends from Dallas out for Bloys Camp meeting. The family was negotiating one final time the sale (or giveaway) of the eye sore business of the family. As we were leaving town and driving back to Dallas with our friends they said, take us for a tour of that old hotel you have downtown here. We cringed and gave them a quick tour then headed north east. By the time we arrived in Dallas that night our friends had convinced us to beg the family not to sell the hotel to the prospective buy but to sell to us. The family was flabbergasted at our idea. They thought we were crazy. We said we were ready to place our Dallas house on the market, quit our jobs and move west. The more they said no the more we tried to convince them not to sell. After 6 weeks we convinced them.

We bought the Limpia properties on New Year’s eve 1990 and operated the business successfully for over 20 years bringing J. C. Duncan’s dreams to fruition.”

The above was written by Joe Duncan and shared with management of Hotel Limpia after it was sold to new ownership.
Photo credit to True West Magazine.