The Poco Loco Ranch — Boerne, Texas

The first chapters belong to the Republic of Texas. Survey 18, the ranch’s southern reach, was granted for military service under a 640-acre bounty in the name of George Dietz and patented on November 18, 1851 to John James of San Antonio — the most celebrated surveyor on this frontier, who a year later platted and named Boerne. Survey 98, the wide northern pastures, began as the headright of Willis Avery, who came to Texas in 1832 and stood with Captain Billingsley’s Mina Volunteers at San Jacinto in 1836. The hills around the ranch became Kreutzberg — “Cross Mountain” — a German farming community named for a cross the Phillip family raised above the valley in 1847.

Somewhere in those years a settler family raised the house that still anchors the ranch: a cooking-and-living room, a bedroom, and a small front porch. In 1929 came the kitchen and master bedroom, set apart from the main rooms by an open dog trot to catch the breeze — the signature of Hill Country houses of that era, and a tribute, as the gate marker says, to the rugged individualism of Kendall County’s early settlers.

The Hardy chapter begins with a locked church door in New York City. Fae Emmerich — a Mississippi newspaper editor’s daughter flying as an American Airlines stewardess, one of 350 chosen from twenty thousand — was trying the door one Sunday when a voice called out, “The other door is open.” It belonged to Bob Hardy, a young Dallas doctor finishing at Cornell who, it turned out, had grown up in her family’s old Dallas church. Three months later he proposed atop Rockefeller Center; three months after that, on March 25, 1956, they married in McComb, Mississippi.

Dr. Robert C. “Bob” Hardy built his practice as a neurosurgeon in San Antonio, and around 1961 he and Fae bought this stretch of the Guadalupe — the old homestead, the windmill, and the river pastures — and christened it Poco Loco: “a little crazy.” They restored and added to the historic house and filled the ranch with seven children, then sixteen grandchildren, then great-grandchildren. For more than sixty years it has been the family’s gathering ground — hayrides and river floats, holidays under the live oaks, weddings within sight of the windmill. Fae — “Mimi” to the generations she presided over — kept it so until her passing in 2026, at ninety-nine. The ranch remains in the family, a little crazy, exactly as named.