A TEXAS TRADITION FOR OVER 100 YEARS!

 

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WUNSCHE GIFTS
Now our Famous Chocolate Whiskey Cake and the authentic Cat's Meow Village handcrafted collectible of the Cafe are available online. Visit our Links section to find these items and visit some of our other friends. (Or come by the Cafe and do it the old-fashioned way!)

INFORMATION
Where are we located?
What are our hours?
How can you contact us?
Find it all here.
Train Map
The Spring Cafe was our friend. Once inside, she stripped us of all pretensions and allowed us to be ourselves. That hometown nostalgia had us waiting for hours for the best hamburgers around. Just short of total dilapidation, the property was sold to us in 1982 after 121 years of Wunsche family title. The stories told by 94-year Willie Wunsche, who helped his father build the original saloon in 1902, took us back to times earlier than the Spring Cafe of 1949.
   Willie's grandparents, Jane and Carl Wunsche, were immigrant children of German families that settled in Spring in 1846. Two of their sons, Dell and Charlie, acquired this property and solicited help from brother William to build this building in 1902. William's son, Willie was 13 that year; his specialty was carrying lunch pails and nail buckets.   Dell and Charlie selected heart lumber from old stand long leaf pine cut at their own sawmill. These trees, typical in this area, were four to six feet in diameter.
Spring was a Houston and Great Northern Railroad boom town by 1902. Before long hotels, saloons, residences and general stores cropped up in this switchyard and stop on the Galveston-Houston-Palestine line. The Wunsche Brothers, railroad men themselves, built the Wunsche Bros. Hotel and Saloon to accomodate railroad employees overnight. In 1923, Houston and Great Northern (now called Missouri Pacific) moved the Spring railyard to Houston. By 1926 most of the town's wood buildings were salvaged for barn construction and firewood. The Wunsche Bros. Cafe and Saloon was the first two-story building erected in Spring and remains today the oldest survivor of the past.
   Some of the old-timers claim thay had their first drink and what-have-you here. The Saloon was the last to close in Harris County by law of Prohibition. Rumor has it that patrons from Houston to Palestine rallied in the dirt streets of Spring with song and dance to drink the bottles dry one long night before the law arrived.
   We are proud to reclaim this old house for the sake of its colorful memories and its continued heritage. In an era where newness surrounds us, it is deeply reassuring to know this day in the cafe, hamburgers are being freshly grilled, as they have been for years.

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