Almost 50 years ago, Ed Story was living and working in Vietnam and Thailand, when he got a hankering to find a piece of Texas to call his own.
“I came here in ’74 to buy a bit of land,” Ed said. “Every day I’d drive out 100 miles, looking.”
Ed says that back then Fredericksburg was actively preserving its historic buildings, but Comfort was not. Much of the town was boarded up. He found an 1880 house that had once been a florist’s shop and before that, at the turn of the century, a blacksmith. It would be the perfect office for this oil executive, and the cold storage that used to hold flowers would be a perfect spot to store wine. The deal closed, and the restoration began. He hasn’t stopped buying and restoring properties and ensuring they get the historic designation to protect them for future generations.
“Once we’ve restored a building, it’ll be protected,” Ed said.
After Ed married Joey, he founded SOCO International in 1990, an oil company that did business in the Far East but was headquartered in London. When they weren’t overseas, the couple began making numerous trips to Comfort before they acquired their ranch outside Center Point. They stayed at what is now Hotel Giles. And that’s how they met Bobby Dent.
“I was born in Georgia, and all I ever wanted to be was 16, to get out,” he said. “I’ve lived here longer than anywhere. People mind their own business, but if you need something, they’re there in a heartbeart.”
Bobby came to Comfort because he fell in love with the 1880 hotel, which he bought and restored. Ed, Joey, and Bobby found they all had a passion for historic preservation. Together they have restored three buildings in Comfort and seven in Center Point.
Because Comfort and Center Point were ignored by developers for decades, that meant the old buildings were deteriorating, but they were still around. No one had torn them down and replaced them with something modern.
“A time warp is good,” Ed said.
Bobby credits Comfort Heritage Foundation with championing the area’s old buildings.
“Without them we would not be able to put these buildings back they way they were,” he said. “We like to get historical markers on anything that we do. They have rigid guidelines.”
Bobby says Joey and Ed met while she was renovating her home.
“When Ed met Joey and saw the square footage of her condo, she had painted it so many times that Ed said it actually had less square footage,” Bobby joked.
But Joey makes no apologies for her love of reworking spaces.
“I love to redo things — bedrooms, living rooms,” she said. “I was dating a friend of Ed’s, and he kept coming to help. He thought maybe if he married me he could stop me.”
Instead she caught the historical restoration bug. Bobby says he and Joey always agree when it comes to the details of a building, even when the contractor does not.
“We’re always on the same page,” he said. “We work well together in that respect.”
Comfort has a designation as a historic district on the National Register of Historic Places, which means 100 buildings constructed between 1854 and 1954 are protected as historic sites. So when the Storys and Dent work to bring a structure back to its original glory, they’re doing work that lasts.
In Comfort, the trio has redone the little house, the 1891 Ingenhuett-Karger Saloon, and the 1913 Karger Building next door, which was once a pool hall. Above it is a loft apartment. The pool hall sports a decorative metal façade designed by the Mesker Co. in Indiana.
“There was a company in Evanston that sold ornamental metal, and they would ship it by rail and cover the entire building with metal to make it look like a stone building,” Bobby said. “People go all over the country visiting these buildings.”
The Storys turned the pool hall into The Elephant Story, which Bobby manages. The store carries handcrafted items from a small Thai village called Baan Ta Klang with about 800 adults. The proceeds from the shop help fund two English teachers for the villagers and veterinary care for the 300 elephants who also live there. It’s the largest concentration of domestic elephants in the world. At the end of the year The Elephant Story will close when Bobby retires, but the foundation the Storys started will ensure the work in Thailand continues.
Joey has been the primary buyer for the shop, since she has been visiting vendors in Thailand for years. She’ll still visit and will probably still buy a few things, but she won’t be buying on such a large scale.
“DHL is gonna say, ‘What happened?’” Ed joked.
If Comfort was ignored by developers to the benefit of its historic buildings, Center Point was even more neglected. But Ed can see a future for the town, and he has a long-term project in mind — getting Center Point named a historic district.
“The future there is that it’s not had a future because it didn’t get the exit off the highway [Interstate 10],” Ed said. “The difference between Comfort and Center Point is that Comfort is a historic district. That’s not the case in Center Point, but the whole community should be.”
The reason? Because of its association with the Texas Rangers.
“There are 23 original Texas Ranger houses in that community. There was [N.O.] Reynolds, the Intrepid, a ranger lieutenant. His house has been passed down through the family,” Ed said. “Thirty-eight Rangers are buried in the cemetery — that’s the largest group of graves of Texas Rangers in the state.”
Joey said that Ed can “drive around Center Point and point out every Ranger house.”
The second building the three friends restored, now Zanzenberg Tavern, is also intimately tied with Ranger history. The walls are limestone, 24 inches thick, which provided protection from skirmishes.
“The ranger captain obliged the Rangers to meet there once a month,” Ed said.
Later the building was a wool and mohair co-op, then a tractor implement store, and it had a couple of attempts at being a residence. The Storys cleared away 13 tons of debris, plus thousands of tin sheds. The second floor was a wreck. There was a dispute with the historical commission about whether the stucco came before or after the Christmas fire of 1900. (It came after.) These kinds of issues are all part of the process of doing a restoration right.
Next door to Zanzenberg the three worked on a bank building, which will soon become something new. A different bank building is now Center Point Art, the town’s first gallery. Ed offices in a building called Shavano, where cars from the Depression-era Hudson Automobiles were once restored. Across the street from his office the trio is restoring the old foundry, Mesa Bronze. They also worked on a house that was “pretty dern cute,” according to Joey. There was another house they tried to save, but it was in such disrepair they could only salvage the stone, for use in a later project.
“In all our restorations, we try to use local people,” Bobby said. “We’re lucky here that we have a lot of good craftsmen.”
Even though she’s lived much of her life in London and Bangkok with Ed, Joey says there’s something unique about this part of the Hill Country.
“When you drive out of Comfort on Highway 27, I don’t know whose land it is, but there’s this big green pasture. Nothing’s on it. When I see it, that’s when I think, ‘I’m home,’” she said. “We had a friend from Thailand who came to visit, and I showed him that piece of land and told him what I just told you: ‘To me, this is Texas.’”
The little house on Comfort’s High Street that Ed first bought is currently the office for his assistant. He and Joey originally redid part of the house to be a winter living quarters for her parents from Montana, but now it’s a B&B.
“It’s also the honorary consulate of Mongolia,” Ed added. He serves as Honorary Consul General in Texas of Mongolia.
With The Elephant Story closing and Bobby relocating to Palm Springs, the Storys expect to spend a bit more time on their piece of Texas land.
“Center of the universe,” Ed said. “There’s no office in London anymore. We go there once or twice a year. To Vietnam, Thailand a couple times a year. Otherwise this is home. Forevermore.”