Open today
Post Office 1886 · This Building 1904
A mercantile, a general store, a feed store, an antiques shop, and a working post office through all of it.
Established
Post office, 1886
This Building
Built 1904
Still Open
USPS window, weekday mornings
Since 1880
The story begins with Hiram G. “Hye” Brown, who opened a small mercantile on the road between Austin and Fredericksburg in 1880. At the time, collecting the mail meant a nine-mile, day-long wagon trip into Johnson City, so Brown petitioned for a post office of his own. In 1886 one was established inside his store. It took his nickname. Before long, so did the town.
Over the years the same roof covered a mercantile, a general store, a feed store and an antiques shop, with the post office running throughout behind its wrought-iron bars. It was the kind of place where you collected your mail, picked up supplies and caught up on the news of the day in a single stop.
1904
In 1904 Brown put up the building that still stands on Highway 290. Above the covered porch runs a band of pressed-metal ornament: scrollwork, shells and turned balusters, picked out in red, sage and charcoal, with HYE spelled across the pediment. Inside, the original doors, pine floors and pressed-tin ceiling are still there.
Fritz Deike bought the store in 1923 from Brown’s widow, and the Deike family stayed close to it for generations. One of them served as postmaster for sixty-two years, and Fritz’s nine sons fielded what was said to be the only all-brother baseball team in Texas.
November 3, 1965
Lyndon Johnson grew up a few miles from here and mailed his first letter from this post office at the age of four, a fact recorded on the Texas historical marker outside.
On November 3, 1965 he came back as President of the United States and stood on this porch to swear in Lawrence F. O’Brien as Postmaster General. Newsreel cameras filled the yard, and half the county stood in the road to watch.
“It was about 53 years ago that I mailed my first letter from this post office.”
President Lyndon B. Johnson, 1965
1975 – 1984
The man taking the oath that morning was Lawrence F. O’Brien. Ten years later he became commissioner of the NBA, and when he stepped down in 1984 the league renamed its championship trophy in his honor: the Larry O’Brien NBA Championship Trophy, lifted every June by whoever wins the title. The Spurs have carried it home five times, an hour down the road in San Antonio.
2011
In the summer of 2011 the Postal Service put the Hye office on its closure list. The community formed the Hye Preservation Society, held town halls, wrote to lawmakers and gathered more than fifteen hundred signatures. By spring 2012 the Postal Service relented, and the office stayed open.
It is still open today, federal property with its own entrance and hours of its own: eight to ten in the morning on weekdays, and eight until noon on Saturdays. Which means you can post a letter with a Hye postmark first thing and come back in the afternoon for a glass of sparkling wine: same roof, different door.
A New Chapter
What was once a gathering place for mail, provisions and conversation now pours Texas-grown, traditional-method sparkling wine.
