Diamond in the Rough

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Bringing life back to Cotulla’s former Stockmens Bank

The former Stockmens National Bank in Cotulla, pictured (above) between a grocery store and a dry goods store on Front Street in downtown Cotulla has been vacant for years and is now the subject of a $1 million refurbishment by the city, which has bought the historic property. Built in 1913, it was one of the grandest brick structures in town and included (below) a stamped-tin ceiling and polished wood teller windows. The bank’s principals are pictured in 1933, including LW Gaddis, Bernie Wildenthal, LA Kerr, Ray Keck, and Jimmy Young. A US currency $10 bill issued by the bank in 1904 was authorized by Keck’s signature.

When its original occupant moved to a modern building on a busier street a few blocks away, a two-story storefront in downtown Cotulla lost the light from its windows and the life from its high-ceilinged rooms.
Although only 38 years old at the time, the imposing brick structure went into a gradual decline, pockmarked with stops and starts, that would continue for the next fifty years.
By the end of the century, few Cotullans thought of it anymore as the home of Stockmens National Bank or remembered how it had once appeared, with its polished wood counters and its stamped-tinplate ceilings. Stripped of its carpentry and decorative trim, the old bank had become little more than a storage facility where signs, furniture, car parts and outdated tools gathered dust.
Even fewer recalled it as having once housed the local telephone exchange, the offices of a gas company, or any retail businesses.
Today, Stockmens National Bank occupies a stylish midcentury building on Main Street, the city’s principal thoroughfare, a far cry from its early days when trade was focused on the railroad line and the cluster of locally owned stores that earned their livelihood from the farmers and ranchers of La Salle County.

The march of progress and the passage of time brought prosperity to Cotulla, a shift in focus to Main from Front Street, and left in their wake the shells of buildings whose better days had come and gone.
Since the 1950s, the block whose tallest building is the former bank has gradually faded from importance and lost some of the features that attracted local residents. Although a car parts store, a saloon and a church are kept busy, significant portions of the vintage Front Street facade that greeted trains in the business district have been erased. Fire claimed the once-popular Majestic Theater in the early 1990s; an adjacent store all but collapsed in on itself. These could have been the deadly final blows to prospects for downtown revitalization, were it not for a series of fortunate events.
Cotulla became a Texas Main Street City in 2006 and marked the designation with an elaborate ceremony that included the state’s first lady at the time, Anita Perry, speeches by local officials and business owners, performances by the high school band, and tours of one of the downtown historic district’s best-preserved but still unrestored original structures.
It wasn’t the former Stockmens Bank building.
The Main Street Program, however, brought renewed attention to the district, particularly Front Street, which at the time still accommodated City Hall, a successful western wear store, a busy car parts store, a small showroom for custom-made furniture, a tax consultant, a saloon bar, a church, and the La Salle County Elderly Nutrition Center.
Positioning its Main Street Program office in the middle of the historic district, the city began promoting downtown revitalization, historic preservation, new business development, street and building beautification, tourism, and public events. Street parties, car shows and Halloween activities were held on Front Street; funds were set aside for businesses to improve their signage or their facades; and state historical commission representatives began drafting proposals that showed how vintage buildings might look if they were restored and occupied by progressive entrepreneurs.
Meanwhile, the old bank stood forlorn and partially boarded up, a block south of the Main Street Program office. An adjacent pit where a sloping floor had once held seats in the Majestic became overgrown with weeds and cluttered with crumbled masonry.
When oil and gas exploration began over the Eagle Ford Shale in 2008, Cotulla saw rapid construction of more than 20 hotels and motels, and began cashing in revenues from an innovative tax that would play a significant role in downtown development.
Aimed at helping promote tourism by funding attractions, the state-endorsed Hotel Occupancy Tax puts revenues into an account that can only be used for specific purposes, namely those that will ultimately put “heads in beds,” to use the City Hall jargon for funding projects that make Cotulla more appealing to visitors.
To date, the fund has enabled Cotulla to pay for sidewalk reconstruction and downtown beautification on Front Street that includes plant beds and authentic gas lanterns, steps and railings; festival promotions; a colorful mural depicting the city and county’s history; and bronze statues of founder Joseph Cotulla over an artesian well and of onetime schoolteacher and later US President Lyndon Johnson.

Bank facade details show the Romanesque style in ornate brick and pilasters popular between the 1890s and 1920s.

The fund even contributed in large part toward the complete refurbishment and modernization of the AB Alexander Convention Center, the building’s second remodel since its conversion in the mid-1990s from a bar and dance hall.
Even though Hotel Occupancy Tax (HOT) revenues waned when the energy industry slowed production in the region and when the coronavirus pandemic wrought havoc on all businesses, the surcharge on every hotel and motel room rented in Cotulla continued to pour funds into the dedicated account.
For the month of April this year alone, HOT revenues to City Hall topped $189,000. In the first seven months of the current budget year, the city collected over $677,000 in hotel taxes.
The fund has now reached the abandoned Stockmens Bank, which the city has bought and stripped to its bones.
Built in 1913 as Stockmens National Bank of Cotulla (never with an apostrophe and later renamed from ‘of’ to ‘in’), the structure is one of the oldest buildings in the city. It is built in the Romanesque Revival style with arched windows and brick pilasters topped by an ornate parapet. At street level, however, the former bank was much altered in later life. By the year 2000, virtually all of its original storefront woodwork had been replaced by “non-historic siding material,” according to a report from the historical commission, and a sidewalk awning had replaced the original.
Metal anchor points where tension bars had once held up the original awning remain, however, and give a clue to the building’s remarkable condition. Closer examination reveals many fixtures and fittings surviving, and architectural preservationists considered the bank worth saving.
Perhaps the most striking features of the building are its large interior spaces. Both the ground floor and second story are open without pillars or dividing walls. Furthermore, since the neighboring property to the north was never occupied by a two-story building, the bank’s tall upstairs side windows are unobstructed and help flood the space with light.
Buying the building instead of waiting for a developer to pick it up helped City Hall ensure that one of the last original Front Street structures – one with a story worth telling – would not only be saved from the wrecking ball or left to further deteriorate and collapse, but would instead be restored and repurposed.
The task would prove costly.
When contractors examined the building, they found walls and floors that had weakened with age, window and roof leaks, inadequate electrical circuitry, and exterior brickwork in serious danger of complete failure.
The last private owner of the building was John Keck of Laredo, descendant of the founder of TR Keck & Sons Lumber. TR Keck was also one of the first presidents of Stockmens National Bank.
The building had had many owners in its lifetime, and Keck came across it in a business deal in which he purchased a car parts store on Front Street from local rancher and business owner Herb Menn.
“I had come back to Cotulla in 2000 and bought my cousin’s share in the lumber yard,” Keck says of his interest in downtown buildings. “When I looked across the street, I could see several storefronts that were architecturally and historically significant but also in need of new investment, new business, new life.”
Keck says the bank purchase was almost an afterthought.
“There was the old bank, the building that my family had been so involved in, and we had sold it a long time ago,” he says. “When it was offered to me as part of a deal on another building, I couldn’t turn it down.”
The bank itself had been founded in 1904 and operated in the building on the corner of the block, only two doors to the north, where A&A Auto Parts now operates. Kerr & Co., Bankers, had begun using the Stockmens name by 1909 and built the large structure on Front Street in 1913. The April 25 grand opening banquet featured such delicacies as baked trout, fillet of beef, angel parfait and assorted cakes. Much of that food had been transported to Cotula in refrigerated railroad boxcars from San Antonio.
As a business, the bank had thrived in its early years, and TR Keck had stayed as an inactive vice president, but the Great Depression struck a blow, and in the early 1930s the enterprise was at risk of going under. Keck died in 1932, and hos son, electrical engineer Ray Keck Sr., traveled to Cotulla from San Antonio with an eye to managing the bank’s recovery. He would remain as president of the bank from 1932 until his death in 1954, by which time the business had been moved to its new site.
Ray Keck Jr. became president of Stockmens National Bank upon his father’s death and stayed there until 1980, when he announced to his family – John included – that he had decided to sell the business.
“That was a shock to us,” John Keck says. “It was a decision he had made, and he was going to stick with it. My family’s connection with the bank was severed. That was our farewell to the business.”
Meanwhile, the original bank had been virtually forgotten. Although its upstairs office space had been leased to the local telephone company for an exchange in the 1930s and 1940s, banking operations had long ago ceased. The building was sold to Pat and Frida Aaronson, who in turn leased it to Woolls & Storey, supplier of propane and butane gas.
It was Aaronson who made many of the changes to the bank’s facade that have now been removed, including a dressing in multicolor tile that was popular in the 1950s.

At the rear, the former Stockmens bank is of plain brick, typical of downtown South Texas buildings in a business district.

The building was then sold to John Reese, whose auto parts store thrived in the next block on the same street, but when it changed hands for the last time, it had been neglected for years.
Keck says he found the building shuttered, dilapidated, and long shy of reopening.
“It had been a storage facility for so long, and a lot of the original features had been stripped,” he says. “Sadly, someone had ripped out the stamped-tin ceiling from the ground floor and sold it.”
Keck recognized immediately that saving the building would cost far more than any private investor might be prepared to pay.
“We thought about what to do with it,” the businessman adds. “We could stabilize it, but it would cost a significant amount. It made more sense for the city to shepherd it into preservation.”
Keck sold the building to the city of Cotulla for $75,000. Since then, HOT revenues have supported two phases of architectural rescue and refurbishment.
The cost to the city has come close to a million dollars.
The Briscoe Architectural Conservation company of San Ignacio, Texas, was contracted by the city to oversee the building’s salvage. A south-facing exterior wall required extensive work and has been sealed and coated with plaster. The roof has been sealed. Window frames and casings have been reproduced to match the originals. At street level, all of the later additions have been torn away and replaced to match the 1913 storefront appearance of the building.
Assistant Main Street Program manager Karina Sauceda, who also serves City Hall as public information officer, says she is excited about the building’s revival and that she is pleased many of the architectural features are being preserved or restored to their original look.
“It’s not a symmetrical storefront,” Sauceda says. “There is a door to the left of the main ground-floor entrance, and this leads directly to the staircase. That door means the perfect symmetry of the wooden window frames and double-door entry for the bank are pushed to the right, so they don’t line up with the upstairs windows. It’s the way it was built, and I think it’s important that we keep it that way.”
Sauceda points to the bank vault, the open-plan sunlit spaces, the simple elegance of the woodwork, the faithfully recreated wooden ceilings, and the exposed brick of the facade as particularly attractive to future occupants. Presently, City Hall plans to use the ground floor space for exhibits and the upstairs for the Main Street Program office.
The tinplate ceiling will be replaced with a modern replica.
“It’s perfect for what we intend to use it for,” Sauceda says. “Open-plan areas like this are valuable and versatile. When it is furnished, it will feel modern, but with plenty of the original history throughout.
For his part, Keck believes the building is of historic significance to Cotulla because it the vital role its business played in the county’s growth for the first half of the twentieth century. While the teller windows and other fittings are long gone, a single waist-height swing door remains and was preserved for years as the gate between the public and the city council table when municipal offices operated at 117 North Front. That gate, Keck says, is a clue to the grandeur and the life of the old bank.
“There are a lot of stories of families, businesses and ranches in La Salle County that feature the bank at some point in their histories,” Keck says. “It’s important that this historical information be preserved, for the sake of the county, for future generations.”
At City Hall, Sauceda examines the yellowed photographs of yesteryear and, like all Cotullans today, points out the landmarks that have survived the ages. The former bank is one of them.
“Downtown Cotulla has changed a lot in a hundred years, and it’s going to keep on changing,” Sauceda says. “We can’t freeze history in one spot, because we would be wasting an opportunity to keep adapting. If these buildings are going to survive for generations to come, they have to be adaptable to modern use. They were modern a hundred years ago, and they can be modern today, but we are saving the features that make them so attractive.”