For anyone wondering what happened with the sports complex in Schertz, there's an article about it in the E-N today:
Schertz: City looking back as it forges ahead
Web Posted: 06/11/2008 01:33 AM CDT
By Elaine Ayo
eayo@express-news.net
As the city continues to grow, officials are working to hold on to a bit of Schertz's agricultural past.
The roughly 100-year-old Kramer house, home to one of the city's early farming families, will be the city's new visitor center. It is also the next development in a multimillion-dollar plan to create several sports and entertainment venues behind the city's municipal complex at 1400 Schertz Parkway.
“This is much bigger than refurbishing an old farmhouse somewhere,” Councilman David Scagliola said.
On June 3, the City Council approved an additional $315,497 from the city's hotel-motel fund to cover the cost of the restoration, a total of $456,000.
The visitor center is the next addition to a master-planned park behind the city's municipal complex that the city has been working on the past four years. The total cost of the project will be at least $5 million to $6 million, city Parks Director George Logan said.
The city already has secured funding for the construction of four baseball fields and the main roads and parking lots for the area. Other parts of the plan that haven't been funded include additional sports fields, a 58,000-square-foot multiuse event center and a shopping area consisting of refurbished historic homes, a concept modeled after Bracken Village off FM 2252, media relations director Brad Bailey said.
The Schertz Parks and Recreation Foundation, a nonprofit organization, has been helping raise funds for the event center, informally dubbed the Schertz Plex.
The Kramer house's original site, across Schertz Parkway from the city's municipal complex, was part of a farm run by the Kramer family until about 1971. Most of it, excluding the house and a few acres, eventually was sold to different entities, including the city of Schertz.
Walter Kramer settled on the land toward the end of the 19th century and cultivated wheat and cotton. Although the city doesn't have exact data on when the house was built, officials estimate it was around the turn of the century because of its many Victorian-era details.
“They didn't really have plans; things were just built by tradition,” said Jerry Mendenhall of J. Mendenhall Architects, who is leading the restoration project for the city.
Pulte Homes, the home builder constructing the Kramer Farm subdivision on the former farmland, donated the house to the city after acquiring it from the Kramer family. The city paid roughly $56,000 to move it to its current location near Schertz Parkway and Live Oak Road.
Besides providing office space for the city's Chamber of Commerce, the visitor center also will house a room dedicated to displaying photos and other memorabilia from the city's history, said Dean Weirtz of the city's recently formed Historical Preservation Committee.
Historic objects collected by the group also will be on display in a museum that will be created in a portion of the 9,000-square-foot former library building at 608 Schertz Parkway when the library moves to its new, 30,000-square-foot facility at Schertz Parkway and Elbel Road.
“This small room in the visitor center will only be kind of a tease to entice visitors to look further into our history at our museum,” Weirtz said.