It was the July Fourth parade that sold Ryan and Katie Grametbaur on Martindale. There were people on horses and lawnmowers and tractors. Kids on bicycles with streamers. A Model T Ford. The route consisted of two passes down a single block because that is the entirety of downtown Martindale—but what a block. On both sides of Main Street, a half dozen restored redbrick buildings made for a picture-perfect time warp to late-nineteenth-century Texas, and people came in from all around Caldwell County to watch “the cutest thing ever,” as Katie puts it.
Four years later, Ryan and Katie are the heavily tattooed owners of Duett’s, a Martindale bar, restaurant, and music venue named after their young daughter, Duetta. The Grametbaurs had both grown up in New Braunfels, barely thirty minutes away, but they had never heard of tiny Martindale (population 1,200) until a few years ago. “Nobody knows!” Ryan says. People who rent tubes at the edge of town to float the San Marcos River might have heard the name Martindale, and people heading east from San Marcos to Luling may have seen the Martindale Texaco on Texas Highway 80 but, Ryan says, “they don’t know that there’s a whole historic strip.” There aren’t even signs on the highway touting the charming downtown. But Ryan, a singer who performs under the name Ryan Quiet, and Katie, a designer who used to create sets for Willie Nelson’s Luck Reunion, are emblematic of a new wave of enterprising folks from bigger cities moving to Martindale and putting it on the cultural map.
Around the time the Grametbaurs discovered the town, a former Silicon Valley executive and venture capitalist named Maury Domengeaux also found himself spending time in Martindale. Domengeaux had gone to high school in Austin back in the seventies and had recently moved back after landing a fortune selling his last company, a marketing agency called 3Q Digital. When he visited an old friend who’d moved to Martindale, he couldn’t tear his eyes away from a derelict building at the end of Main Street. The only two-story structure on the strip, it was missing most of its roof, and after years of being exposed to the elements, it was little more than a brick shell and a roost for buzzards.
When COVID hit in early 2020, Domengeaux scrapped his plans to travel the world for his next chapter. Eager for something else to do, he started reading up on the old building and learned that it once housed a dealership for Hupmobile, a line of cars in the early twentieth century. He’d grown up the son of a car dealer in Humble, outside Houston, so the history spoke to him. He learned that the building, known as the Martindale Motor Corporation, had been condemned by the city, and that the only reason it hadn’t been knocked down was that nobody had the budget to do so. The crumbling structure was overshadowing Martindale’s true charm, he figured, and doing something about it represented “a chance to make a really big contribution to a small town.”
Today the portico at the southeast corner of the meticulously restored Martindale Motor Corporation building shades the entrance to Duett’s, which occupies most of the bottom floor. There’s a stage and a dance floor in the back corner of the restaurant, and a swooping bar made of reclaimed longleaf pine in the front. A clothing boutique holds down the far end of the building, and a few Airbnb apartments are available for rent upstairs. Other small businesses have opened all up and down Martindale’s storybook stretch of Main Street in the past few years—a cafe, a vintage shop, a yoga studio, and a plant boutique—and the Grametbaurs have started booking touring bands from as far away as Nashville to come play their venue. Martindale, it seems, is suddenly vaulting from pit stop to destination.
The story of Martindale’s rise goes back twenty years, to when a Democratic political insider named Carlton Carl found his way to the town. Carl had grown up in Houston, and he had a long career in Texas politics—it brought him close to the likes of Molly Ivins and Bob Bullock and eventually took him to Washington, D.C., as a press secretary for various members of Congress—with a real estate habit on the side. As far back as the early seventies, when Carl was fresh-faced aide to Texas Governor Preston Smith, he’d dreamed of buying and fixing up a little town. One day in 2005, he found Martindale online while looking for “a project to bring me back to Texas.” With the proceeds from the sale of a single nine hundred-square-foot townhouse in D.C., he bought 36,000 square feet of mostly abandoned space on Main Street in Martindale, which amounted to the entire downtown except for city hall and the Martindale Motor Corporation.
Two years later he was living in town, having also bought a handsome A-frame house on a shady half-acre lot one block off Main Street. Renovations to the storefronts went slowly at first: a roof here, a facade there. He kept historic details, such as the iron rings in the sidewalk, which folks used to tie up their horses when they shopped in one of the three general stores named after the town’s founding cotton-farming families. Over time, Carl started offering low-rent space to photographers, artists, and at one point a pickle maker. He teamed up with a retired middle school librarian from Plano—whose husband’s family has roots in Martindale going back to the 1890s—to open a single-room library, one of the smallest in Texas.
Even before Carl arrived, Martindale had become a coveted spot for Hollywood location scouts, who used the town as a backdrop for various films, including Texas Justice, a made-for-TV movie based on writer Gary Cartwright’s Texas Monthly feature and subsequent book about the famous Cullen Davis murder trial. Shortly after Carl bought up most of Martindale, Cartwright paid him a visit and wrote about it—which was also right around when The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning was shot in town. Last year, TV mogul Taylor Sheridan, who grew up in Fort Worth, shot parts of the Yellowstone prequel 1923 in one of Carl’s buildings, the same mock courthouse used for scenes of the Davis trial decades earlier.
When Ryan and Katie Grametbaur arrived in Martindale in 2019, they took over a tiny cafe in one of Carl’s buildings. The Martindale River Cafe had been more of an idea than actual business to that point, with haphazard hours and a few pizza slices brought in from Loop & Lil’s in nearby Lockhart. The revamped cafe opened right as COVID changed everything, and Ryan and Katie started booking bands to play in the empty lot across the street, right next to the shell of the Martindale Motor Corporation building. Music fans started trekking into town because, as Katie remembers, “We were the only open music venue in a sixty-mile radius.”
Carl, whose white beard and twinkle in his eyes earn him comparisons to Santa Claus, had established a catchphrase for his efforts to revive the town: Believe in Martindale. There were bumper stickers and T-shirts available at the library. But he’d never quite managed to attract tenants who could turn the place around. “People had no concept of what it takes because the buildings had sat empty since the late sixties at least,” he says. That’s when Martindale’s only public school closed down and students had to go to San Marcos.
But Katie saw herself and Ryan as different from all the rest, no garden-variety entrepreneurs. “You don’t know what we’re capable of,” she remembers telling Carl when they first met. “I’m going to make all of your buildings full, and we’re going to blow this town up.”
The cast of characters who have brought downtown Martindale back to life keeps growing, like a miniature version of booming Lockhart. When Ryan and Katie opened Duett’s, they sold the Martindale River Cafe to one of their employees, Emily Preston. (It’s now across the street from its original location, in an airy space with ample seating.) A couple of empty nesters from Austin, Wendi and Craig Foster, bought the old Martindale School building and opened it in 2019 as a wedding and event venue that mixes historic small-town charm with impeccable mid-century modern style. The list goes on.
But perhaps the biggest change remains on the horizon. Martindale sits a mere eight miles from Interstate 35, directly between San Marcos and Lockhart. As San Antonio and Austin merge effectively into one megametropolis, this area is quickly filling in with vast housing developments. Throughout Central Texas, once-small towns have been swallowed whole by the sprawl: Buda, Dripping Springs, New Braunfels. Gruene, now contained within the latter but separated by a Guadalupe River moat, has been preserved as a legendary honky-tonk destination—but it’s more of a Texas theme park today than a functioning town.
The Martindale crowd aim to avoid those fates, but the town is hardly invisible to major developers. Much of Caldwell County is a federally designated Opportunity Zone, meaning there are generous tax incentives available to spur economic growth. The population of greater Martindale has crept up by a couple of hundred in recent years. Taking advantage of various incentives from the state as well as the federal government was the only way Domengeaux was able to fund the painstaking reconstruction of the Martindale Motor Corporation building. “I’m not completely financially insane,” he jokes. For a project with a price tag that ultimately topped $5 million, he paid less than half from his own pocket, he says. In the process, he got downtown federally recognized as a historic district. Ironically enough, Martindale’s saving grace from overdevelopment may end up being the fact that it sat lost in time for so long. Because there’s been so little development in the center of town, it’s now protected. “This town is a mothballed bubble of the late eighteen-hundreds and the Wild West,” Domengeaux says. “It’s all preserved.”
Meanwhile, investors are circling and ideas are percolating, and folks who own a piece of the town have begun to find themselves entertaining offers to sell. Could one of the Victorian houses become a spa? Could the shell of the old cotton gin house a brewery, or a barbecue joint overlooking the river? Carl, who turned 79 this year, has his heart set on turning a cluster of ten 18-foot-wide cottonseed silos right at the edge of downtown into an unconventional kind of motel or short-term rental complex—something like Marfa’s El Cosmico. “I’ve gotten some estimates,” he says. He figures he can do the whole project for $1 million.
All of which leaves one looming question: As outsiders come in and transform Martindale, regardless of if they’re megadevelopers or preservation-minded gentrifiers, will the folks who lived there to begin with get priced out? It’s a question nobody wants to linger on, but real estate prices in historic central Martindale have doubled in the past five years—and good luck finding something desirable that hasn’t been snapped up by word of mouth before it even hits the market. You can now buy an $80 kimono-inspired romper for your baby on Main Street at the Memphis June boutique next door to Duett’s. Change is here.
For Ryan and Katie, making sure their business serves the people in town is a core part of the experience. When the bar first opened, Katie says, some locals were wary. “There was a little bit of, ‘What are y’all doing?’ But they trust us now.” Duett’s has a $20 steak night every Wednesday, dollar wings on Thursdays, and $2 Lone Stars. They’re booking cumbia and tejano and metal bands, not just buzzy Americana singer-songwriters. “We hope to bridge that gap,” Katie says. At the car show Duett’s put on this November, plenty of collector classics and hot rods showed up—but the vehicle that took first place was a tractor.
