H-E-B Started as a One-Room Kerrville Grocery

Sixty dollars and one room are enough to change how a place remembers itself. H-E-B began in Kerrville in 1905, when Florence Thornton Butt moved her family there and opened Mrs. C. C. Butt's Staple and Fancy Grocery on the ground floor of the family home.

The early business was plain and local. Howard Edward Butt delivered groceries by wagon as a boy, then took over management in 1919. In 1922 he moved away from the old credit-and-delivery model, switched to self-service cash-and-carry, renamed the store C. C. Butt Cash Grocery, and added a meat market. The familiar H-E-B name came later, but the Kerrville beginning was small enough to fit under one roof.

The one-room store, the $60 investment, and Howard's wagon deliveries keep the origin human-scaled. The business changed its methods as it grew, but Kerrville's part of the story began inside the Butt family home.

That one-room beginning is still the striking part: a family home, sixty dollars, and a boy making grocery deliveries by wagon.