When David Allen plows fields or bales hay at his ranch on the Blanco River near Kyle, he’s following old footsteps: those of his great-grandfather, Ezekiel Edward Nance, a former Arkansas state treasurer who settled here in Hays County in 1853.
But David is also making new tracks on the land where he grew up. He and his wife, Shyrle Allen, have turned their working ranch into a country getaway with a pair of authentically restored historic lodges—and about a dozen llamas. “We were trying to diversify,” Shyrle explains of both the rentals and the woolly Andean pack animals living the good life at New Tracks Llama Ranch Bed & Breakfasts.
New Tracks Llama Ranch Bed & Breakfasts
Cypress Road, Kyle
512-847-3909 or 512-268-3211
llamatracks.com
An overnight stay in the 1840-era log cabin at New Tracks Llama Ranch Bed & Breakfasts is $125; the rock cottage, with a full kitchen, is $135 per night.
Despite the newness in the name, time seems to stand still at New Tracks, which is how David and Shyrle prefer it. “I often wish I had grown up in the 1800s,” says 85-year-old David, who remembers riding into the small town of Kyle as a child and finding dirt streets and hitching racks for horses in front of the general stores.
Heading west from Kyle, the narrow country lane that leads back to New Tracks passes fields of bluebonnets in the spring and live oaks that branch overhead year-round. Drivers have to stop and open a couple of gates. Glimpses of the Blanco sparkle through brushy woods.
Upon arrival, guests make their way to a log cabin dating to 1840; the Allens moved the building to their property from La Grange about 15 years ago. Or they cozy up to a cottage built in the 1880s from hand-carved limestone that once formed a rock boundary around the historic ranch.
Inside the rock cottage, an even older room once held spring water that kept bottles of milk cool. As for the exposed cedar logs and oak timber in the cottage’s upstairs bedroom, David repurposed them from an old barn the family constructed around 1860 with logs his great-grandfather cut on his river-powered sawmill. In addition to the sawmill, Nance also built and operated a three-story gristmill, a beef-packing facility, and later a cotton gin on the banks of the Blanco.
“Ezekiel Nance was quite the entrepreneur,” David says.