Lot 1-A

Start at the stone entrance and keep the wire on your right. The eastern edge carries it the full length, the southern line nearly to the corner, and a fair stretch of the northern side is strung as well, so most of the perimeter already reads as worked land before you step inside. What sits within those lines is the surprise. Tract 1-A is 13.887 acres of ranch land for sale at the X-E Ranch in Kimble County, Texas, and it is nothing like a raw piece of dirt you would have to start from scratch on.

An electric roll gate swings the front open onto a caliche drive packed hard enough to carry a loaded truck season after season. Past it, the trees begin. Oak makes most of the shade out front with cedar worked in here and there, and the timber angles from the northern reach toward the southwest corner, roughly a fifth of the place under canopy. Under those limbs somebody laid a white caliche loop that curls among the trees in front of the house. A race track. Whether it was paced for exercise or driven with go carts is anybody's guess, and that one is yours to settle. The terrain lifts some 41 ft end to end, roughly 2,165 to 2,206 ft, most of that rise between the county road and the buildings, which is exactly why the buildings sit where they do.

The house is the heart of it: three bedrooms, three baths, an office, and two rooms to gather in, kept by people who cared what the place looked like on a Sunday afternoon. A concrete pavilion wraps it, wide enough for chairs and a table out of the sun. The wood rail circling the yard wears antlers gathered over the seasons, elk, axis, whitetail, sika and more besides, and that rail tells you what this property was used for before you ask a single question. A two-car garage with roll-up doors sits off to one side, with a shaded spot for the barbecue and a mortared fire pit ringed by benches under the limbs. Ask us what stays with the place when you visit. The sellers have kept it furnished and ready, and that is a conversation worth having at the kitchen table.

Out back the operation shows itself. An insulated well house, a skinning pavilion with a roof over it, and a pair of breeding pens sit on the rear portion, which is wrapped in game wire tall enough to turn a deer. This dirt raised whitetail bucks and the decor on every wall says so. A trader in exotics would look at this one twice. What the well produces, and what shape the pens are in, are things to verify with us and with your own eyes, and we would rather you did that than take our word for it.

The water here catches rain. A small stock tank sits toward the southern end of the tract, and a bigger pond lies on the back portion with wildflowers coloring the bank when the rains have been kind. Neither one is something I will promise you in a dry August. Look at both on the day you visit and judge what each is worth to a deer herd.

Roughly 300 ft of dirt ranch road already crosses the northern portion, so reaching the back end doesn't mean cutting a new path with a dozer. It is a working trail, not a driveway. Use it to haul feed, check the pens, or ride out at first daylight.

The county seat is just up the road, laid out in 1876 beside the joining of two rivers and named for it. Harper lies to the east and Kerrville sits off I-10. Four miles south of town, the old Buck family ranch is a state park now, where the pecan bottoms beside the river shelter one of the largest winter Rio Grande turkey roosts in Central Texas, with records going back roughly a hundred years. That is the neighborhood this tract belongs to.

Access is deeded. The rules stay short, nothing operating as a business, nothing standing between you and a home or a weekend retreat. Owner financing is ours to write, with as few as 5% to get started. Plan a morning and wear shoes you don't mind dusting. We will roll the gate open, take you around the pens and the house, and leave you sitting on that porch a while before anybody talks price.