Menard, Texas

Spanish Mission Santa Cruz de San Saba I recently worked in Menard-a small town in the middle of nowhere South West Texas. Menard is one of those small towns that has nothing much going for it, and yet it still manages to boast a couple of tourist attractions. One is a recreation of an historic site that was about thirty miles away and the other is a ditch that runs through the middle of town.

Now I think it takes a special kind of chutzpa to call a ditch a tourist attraction and to even go so far as to name it The Ditch Walk-as if it is in the same league of attractions as say-The San Antonino River Walk. Well, The Ditch Walk is not as exciting as it sounds. There is a trench about four feet wide filled with water and a small path with a number of benches running along side it. A thing of beauty if a joy forever.

The other pseudo-attraction is Spanish Mission Santa Cruz de San Saba-or more precisely, the remains of a 1936 replica of the Spanish Mission Santa Cruz de San Saba built by the WPA. This is more my kind of attraction, old rocks with cactus growing within the crumbling structure. It’s pretty clear that the people who run the Menard Country Club and Golf Course have no love for this site.

There are no signs once you leave the main road, and when I drove down the wrong the road, the people running the golf course seemed genuinely pissed off that I did not know where the replica Mission was located. It’s at the end of the paved road, a sharp right before you drive out into the gold course-which is what I did.

Menard looks likes it’s on it’s way to being a ghost town, but hasn’t quite made it yet. The little reconstructed Mission is falling apart and there is not even a beg box to help with conservation efforts-this may be due to the fact that there are no conservation efforts.

There are a number of old buildings in Menard, as there seem to be in most of the small and forgotten towns of America, but none of them are especially note worthy.

One more odd thing about Menard, Texas-I couldn’t find a restaurant. For most tiny towns this is not all that uncommon, but Menard is not nearly as tiny as other towns where I have found Dairy Queens and McDonalds. And there were three motels on the main drag, I guess the Spanish Mission Santa Cruz de San Saba really is a pretty popular tourist attraction.