Midland Reporter-Telegram
Sometime later, it was also where Ty proposed to her. Standing on a creaky wooden staircase, he said when he knelt down to pop the question, a flock of pigeons burst into the air.
"I told Amie, 'Well, they're not doves, but at least you know what you're getting into,'" he recalled with a laugh.
Before tackling the restoration of the old livery stable, however, they took on the newer building. Built in the early 1900s, it now hosts a home health care business and his law office.
Starting any restoration project is a challenge but the older a building, the bigger the task can be.
"This was our first project together, we spent two-and-a-half years, evenings and weekends, down here carpentering," Ty told the Abilene Reporter-News (http://bit.ly/1g3t3gD). "For better or worse, we did every bit of the carpentry work in here."
Replacing sections of the stamped tin ceiling made for delicate work but not because of the frailty of the surviving original pieces.
"The old pieces are strong. You can almost walk on them without bending them. But the new ones, you drop them and they're just ruined," Ty said, adding they were the thickness of a soda can. "Really hard to work with, we're glad we didn't have to buy too many."
The walls needed work, too. Textured with swirls and slight depressions, the original plan was to replace them with something smoother. But digging into them turned into a lesson on construction practices in the Old West.
"When we started chipping on everything, big old clumps of horse hair, tails and manes, started falling out," Ty said. "This stuff was horsehair stucco. They used that for tensile strength, like you'd use fiberglass now."
These days, the two are putting their efforts to bringing the old stable into modern use. Amie, who majored in anthropology at Texas Tech, used to hold archaeology camps when she was the director of the city's Heart of West Texas Museum. Peeling back the layers of wood, glass and stucco which covered the livery stable was a sedimentary trip through all the different styles of what people thought a building should look like during the 20th century.
A good example was the roof. As the old one was stripped away, they learned that nothing went to waste when it came to building materials, especially signs.
"One of the planks was an old billboard that said, 'Saves Lives.' We don't know what saved lives, but I ended up prying that off the roof before they put the new one on," Amie said. "So something saves lives and now we have a piece of that."
They kept a collection of whatever artifact that showed up, like horseshoes or old medicine bottles. Ty pointed out that each original plank nailed in the ceiling or a wall is held in by hand-forged nails.
"No two are alike," he said.
The couple was laughing one day looking over old deeds. In Mooar's time and for some years afterward, Colorado City was booming and land values reflected that.
"Some of those lots that were over here on this side of town would go for $10,000 a lot in 1880," he said. "Now you can buy those for like $500."
That's some serious depreciation even without taking into account inflation. But change is in the wind for Colorado City.
"It's really a fun time right now in Colorado City," Ty said. "It's one of the first times — in a long time — where you can justify the expense of these projects as something that has the potential not to just be altruistic, but to be profitable."
Along Interstate 20, Ty described the price of land as having gone from $500 to $50,000 an acre thanks to interest in the Cline Shale. The couple's plan for the stable is to turn the bottom into office space and upstairs into lofts.
"Anybody can build a new building, but all these buildings have their own story," Ty said. "The reason you buy it, is because it has a great story behind it."
The livery stable is a link to the story of the Old West.
"These guys were at the battle of Adobe Walls, they were at Fort Griffin. If there was something that was associated with this part of the world, they were at the middle of it," he said.
When the roof starts to go on these old buildings, Amie said that meant there might only be 10 or 15 years left before the structure is too far gone for repair.
"This was an intimidating project, 8,000 square feet of needing-something-done," Ty admitted. "But we always knew we were going to do something special with this.
"Instead of it being lost, it's something that 100 years from now someone can come inside and it will still be telling those stories."