Lot 1

Come out in the middle of an August afternoon, when the grass has gone the color of straw and the heat sits on you, and you'll head straight for the front of this place. The oaks along the southeast side are thick, dark, and old, and the temperature drops the moment you step under them. Cicadas, and not much else. That shade is the first argument for Tract 1, a 35.53 acre piece of ranch land for sale at Elm Springs in Menard County, and it's the thing you'll still be thinking about on the drive home.

Those oaks run along the front of the tract, where roughly 1,890 ft of the southeast side lies against Ranch Road 1773. A pipe gate sits at the main entrance, tucked back against the tree line, so you turn off the pavement and you're in the trees within a truck length. Some of these live oaks are the kind you don't plant in a lifetime, with heavy horizontal limbs that fork low and a trunk you'd need help reaching around. Deer and turkey work timber like this on their way out to feed, and shade this dense is where cattle bed down in the worst of the summer. Camp under it and you'll understand fast why the front of the tract is the part people remember.

Behind the oaks the country opens up. The north half is wide open field, native grass with scattered mesquite and yucca standing up out of it, prickly pear here and there along the edges. There's about 27 ft of fall across the whole tract, so it rolls just enough to shed water and give the ground some shape without ever getting steep. A two-track already runs out through the grass toward the far tree line. You can see a long way across it. That combination is unusual and useful: cover and shade in the front, open ground in the back where you'd set a barn, a set of pens, a food plot, or a house pad that looks out over grass instead of into brush.

A water well has already been dug on the place, capped and sitting in the grass, though no pump has been hooked to it yet. We'll show you exactly where it is and what we know about it, and what it will and won't do is something to have checked out before you count on it. Same goes for electric service. The tract lies right along the highway, which is the first question the co-op will ask, but the cost and the route are a conversation to have with them rather than a promise from us. The place is fenced, and the recorded survey and title work govern where the lines actually fall.

• Roughly 1,890 ft along Ranch Road 1773 on the southeast side
• Heavy live oak cover across the front, open native grass through the north half
• Gentle roll, about 27 ft of fall from one end to the other
• Existing well, capped and unpumped

Menard County sits on the northwestern edge of the Hill Country, where the oaks start giving way to bigger sky and the country turns lonesome in the best way. This is the San Saba valley. Spain built a mission and a stone presidio near Menard in 1757, the mission burned inside a year, and its site stayed lost until archaeologists turned it up in the 1990s. The presidio ruins still stand on the riverbank and anybody can walk them. Jim Bowie rode out here in 1831 hunting the lost San Saba silver mine, found a famous fight instead, and the town still throws Jim Bowie Days every June over a mine nobody has ever produced. Legend is all it is. It's still good country to be from.

Elm Springs runs 1,694 acres, cut into surveyed tracts with light restrictions that mostly keep commercial operations out, which is how the valley stays what it's always been. Owner financing is available with as little as 5% down. If you can, come walk it in the fall after the first cool front, when the grass has cured and you can see through the timber. Wear boots you don't mind putting through prickly pear. We'll open the gate, take you back through the oaks to the open ground, and stand you at the well head so you can see the whole thing for yourself.