About the Station

Short’s Resort Field Station (SRFS) is the public face of a roughly 100-acre restoration on a tract above the Lampasas River in the Texas Hill Country.

The name is a small joke — there is no resort, only a cabin, a river and seven sections of ground shaped by generations of working it: decades of grazing and, later, a hay monoculture that in time crowded out much of what had been native to it. It came into a family’s keeping, and the choice was to tend it, in the open, and to organize the work like an institution so that it outlasts any one season.

How the land came to us

The tract, about 103 acres on the Lampasas, came into the family four generations ago. Our great-grandfather, known to everyone as “Short,” farmed wheat in Killeen, Texas, until the federal government took his farm in the 1940s to build what became Fort Hood. Displaced, he was granted this ground in Lampasas County and did here what he had always done: he grew wheat for seed, and by reputation some of the highest-quality wheat seed in the region.

The land he took over was native trees and grasses over heavy cedar. Family accounts have ship-anchor chains strung between two tractors and dragged across the ground to pull every tree out by the roots. Cleared, it became a wheat farm and a steady income for years. In the early 1960s Short built the cabin down by the river with his children — our grandfather and great-aunts. The family home was across the road on separate acreage, where they raised goats and sheep and cut hay; the cabin was the other thing: somewhere to cool off in the Lampasas after a day in the fields. They named it, half in earnest, “Short’s Resort.” The original hand-painted sign was the work of our great-aunts. It has never had running water or electricity; for years propane ran a refrigerator, a stove, a heater and a few lamps, and only remnants of those remain. The outhouse washed away in a flood long ago.

Fallow, then leased for grazing

When Short retired from farming he let the field go mostly fallow but kept cattle on it under lease. By the standards we hold now it was grazed harder than the ground could carry — the common practice of the day — and there was no fence holding the cattle off the river. The banks eroded, and so did the central drainage corridor; manure ran off, seasonal floods pushed through, and between them larger old trees went down while little new growth came up. Wild pig and white-tailed deer numbers ran unchecked on top of it. When Short passed and our grandfather took over, the land was kept much the same way for years, as it always had been.

That began to change on a visit to work on the old cabin, when the state of the ground was plain enough to act on. We fenced a hundred feet off the river bank and around the cabin to keep the cattle off the water. It slowed the bank erosion; the overgrazing and the corridor washout on the agricultural plain continued.

The Tifton years, and the turn

Eventually the cattle came off entirely and our grandfather planted the field in Tifton 85 bermudagrass, on USDA advice at the time: a low-maintenance grass that could be cut for hay and carry a small, steady income. For nearly twenty years it was fertilized and cut and looked the part, but over time it built a monoculture across much of the property — an outcome no one intended — that pushed out the native grasses, shrubs and trees, and with them the dove, quail and raptors that had used the ground.

Our grandfather passed in 2023 and the land came to the fourth generation of the family. We grew up coming to the cabin with our grandparents: camping, fishing and swimming in the cool Lampasas, and taking our first deer on this ground. Since 2023 we have been building the proposal now underway: clear the Tifton monoculture and return the ground to native trees, grasses and woody shrubs, to bring back the native birds and riparian woodland species, slow the erosion as far as we can and restore the oak prairie and river habitat this stretch of the Hill Country carried for most of its history. Four generations on, the cabin still stands, and the work is only the newest form of tending the same ground.

An institution, deliberately

The station is organized into departments: Forestry & Fire, Water & Power, Wildlife, Agriculture & Grazing, Hospitality and the Office of the Steward, each with its own seal and section of responsibility. It is smaller than that sounds. But the structure is the point: it makes the work legible, hands it off cleanly and keeps the records honest.

How it’s supported

The restoration is supported by two specific grants. Cost-share comes through the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service under the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (NRCS EQIP), administered by the Lampasas County field office. Grassland conversion is supported by a Texas Parks & Wildlife Pastures for Upland Birds (PUB) grant, which is turning our Tifton 85 hayfield back into native prairie. Public support leaves a public trail: practices and outcomes are posted in the Field Journal as they’re completed.