For Good or Bad, Bushes Put Crawford on the Map

The marquee outside the Coffee Station on dusty and dilapidated Main Street bears the only clue that a sitting president of the United States bunks here:

“Crawford, Texas. Home of President George W. Bush. NOW SERVING LARGE PIZZA.”

This is the only restaurant in Crawford, population 705, a place that, like many of Texas’ fabled small towns, has spent the last 20 years slowly dying. But whenever the Bushes come home, they bring such an entourage that owner Kirk Baird has to put two extra people on each shift.

“We built this place for the town,” says Baird, whose recently remodeled establishment regularly supplies the Secret Service with jalapeno-studded hamburgers. “But we just happened to build it when President Bush was elected and the world dropped in on us.”

Suddenly, tourists are coming in from all over the United States and as far away as Vienna. Network news crews pitch camp in the old high school gymnasium. The world is looking at Crawford just when Crawford is looking its worst. In fact, it’s falling apart.

The sidewalks are crumbling, the streets are pocked with potholes. The sewer lines are so old they barely accommodate the handful of businesses already here, much less the new ones eager to capitalize on the town’s star boarder.

The 1,600-acre Bush ranch, with its geothermal heating and bass-stocked pond, stands in contrast to the rest of Crawford. Main Street, short and gap-toothed with empty storefronts, can’t support as much as a grocery store. The water mains are so old there is always dirt in the bottom of some people’s toilets.

But good fortune dropped a president into the lap of this little ranching community. Now Crawford stands at the brink of fame or ruin: Fame if it can parlay rocketing property values and global attention into sensible prosperity. Ruin if it’s swallowed up by opportunists who don’t care that this 134-year-old town wants to shed its warts, not its innocence.

Crawford, with its five churches, two gas stations and a barber who gives straight-razor shaves for $2, has been given a chance to reinvent itself. The question is, how?

“All the possibilities lie in our hands,” says Mayor Robert Campbell, who is pastor of the United Methodist Church. “We can use this to our advantage. We can let it overwhelm us and get lost. Or we can do nothing, and the city dies.”

Not even five months into the Bush presidency, Crawford--90 minutes north of Austin in what they like to call the heart of Texas--is transformed already. Antique stores are moving in. And they can’t keep enough Bush T-shirts in stock at Stan Nagel’s service station. A chamber of commerce has just been formed, and residents Danny and Katie Garvin have set up a Web site to tout the town (https://www.crawfordtx.com).

On any average day, a couple of dozen cars bump down Prairie Chapel Road toward the Bush manor, seven miles outside of town. And hundreds of reporters, Secret Service agents and tourists descend when the president is in town, forcing local children off their bikes.

“It’s changed our lives,” complains Keith Lynch, a Bush neighbor whose 100-year-old goat and sheep ranch is worth about a third more now than before Bush moved in. Land values are rising, but few residents care--farms stay in the same families for generations. “We’re not in the sellin’ business,” Lynch declares, walking out of the barbershop, a fresh crew cut under his white cowboy hat.

Still, Crawford could use a boost. Government grants are expected to pay only about half the cost of new water and sewer lines. There are no jobs to speak of; the tax base is infinitesimal.

The town’s pride and joy (the president notwithstanding) is a school district that ranks among the top 1% in the state. It is the one thing that has attracted new blood to Crawford in recent years, mostly people willing to commute to Waco, about 20 miles to the east. Crawford High School graduated its largest class ever this year: 48.

Nevertheless, residents are hardly leaping at the chance to turn a fast buck. When two Waco businessmen sought to build a private club that serves alcohol--Crawford has been dry for decades--the Baptists mobilized and ran them out of town.

For years, Raydean Damon couldn’t sell the vacant store her husband bought before he died. When Bush was elected, she got at least 15 calls and turned them all down, deciding to go into business herself selling local artwork, gifts and homemade cheesecakes.

“I didn’t want to sell to outsiders. We need the revenue in Crawford,” says Damon, 68, an art teacher who wore out a tractor 30 years ago mowing vacant lots to keep Crawford looking nice. She remembers when the town had three grocery stores, a movie theater, a Chevrolet dealership and a drugstore. Now you have to go to Waco to buy a pair of pants.

It was the solitude of the place that attracted Bush and his wife, Laura, to buy the Crawford property in 1999 and build their ranch. He joined the PTA, gave money to the volunteer fire department, posed for pictures in the Coffee Station parking lot and dropped into February’s inaugural ball at the community center, where somebody played “Hail to the Chief” on a fiddle. Most recently, Bush went to the ranch to prepare for his trip to Europe. The locals, though, hardly see him.

Bill Sparkman, the town barber for 40 years, is waiting for Bush to stop in for a trim. “He could come in any day. He might surprise me.”

The president spends his time working and playing on the ranch, which the Secret Service guards like a fortress. “Have you seen President Bush’s gate yet?” Pastor Mike Murphy of the First Baptist Church asks proudly, aptly summing up the strictly limited access that prevents so much as a glimpse of the famous Texas White House.

The county has posted signs warning: “No Stopping, No Parking, No Standing.” Taking pictures is discouraged. Some tourists have been cited for getting out of their cars, prompting the Waco Tribune-Herald to opine that people ought to at least be able to stop and take a snapshot. “He is America’s president, after all.”

But the restrictions didn’t much bother Betty Price and Bill Hawkins, retirees from Tyler, Texas, who drove through one day as much to view the president’s property as to see Crawford before it turns into something else.

“We can come back in two years and it won’t be the same place,” predicted Price, who spent $2.13 on a pint of Blue Bell White Chocolate Almond ice cream (an example of the commerce Crawford leaders hope to attract).

“We have to be in control of our own destiny,” Mayor Campbell says from the pocket-size City Hall, which recently replaced its rotten awning in a bit of civic improvement.

Now you can walk all the way to the barbershop in the rain without getting wet.

Crawford is trying to think ahead. A newly formed growth committee with representatives from around the region meets regularly.

The question members face: How to make Crawford and neighboring Waco--famous for the Branch Davidian catastrophe and the Dr Pepper Museum--a vacation destination spot.

By every indication, this will be Bush’s home after he leaves office. Some hope the inevitable presidential library will wind up at Baylor University in Waco, adding yet another tourist draw.

Crawford is studying the mistakes of similarly tiny Plains, Ga., which was overrun by tourists--10,000 a day--eager to visit the birthplace of then-President Carter.

Campbell even traveled to Plains last month to find out what the last little town to host a president did right and wrong, his trip paid for with money Crawford collected selling souvenir inaugural postage stamps.

In Plains, the grocery store went bankrupt because the locals had no place to park. The town neglected to build public restrooms, leaving the town’s two gas stations to handle the demand. Town leaders issued a permit for a “folk gathering” that turned out to be a Ku Klux Klan rally.

Still, Plains thrived. Even now, when the visitors have dwindled to 10,000 a year, the Baptist church that seats 300 draws twice that when Carter attends. And tourism spikes every time the former president writes another book.

“The people of Crawford just need to be careful,” cautioned Jan Williams, Amy Carter’s former fourth-grade teacher who now operates a tour guide business. “It can wreck a little town. It could have wrecked ours. But it didn’t.”

It’s hard for some people in Crawford to imagine so much interest in their sleepy community. There was talk of a 21-room bed and breakfast inn moving in.

“If we spend a million on a hotel and nobody comes, I don’t know,” Baird of the Coffee Station says skeptically. “I’ve seen two buses come through this town so far and neither one of them stopped.”

Meanwhile, fledgling committees are busy studying tourism and marketing techniques, all in the hope that one day in Crawford, you’ll be able to get more than a burger, a haircut and a tank of gas.

“If you can’t sustain a grocery store, a bank and a couple of gas stations, if there’s no place for young people to be gainfully employed, then you have to see the writing on the wall,” Pastor Murphy says. “If something doesn’t change, we are going to dry up and blow away.”