About the Station

Short’s Resort Field Station is the public record of a land restoration on a 103-acre tract above the Lampasas River in the Texas Hill Country. 98.78 acres of it are filed in seven restoration sections. On the EPA’s ecoregion map this ground is Limestone Cut Plain (Level IV, 29e), the southern end of the Cross Timbers. It is not the Edwards Plateau, even though the two share most of the same trees. Locally it’s called the Lampasas Cut Plain, and that shapes what will actually grow here.

The name is a joke that stuck. There’s no resort, just an old cabin, a cool river, and seven sections of ground that four generations of farming, grazing and hay wore down. The land came to our family, and we decided to fix it in the open, and to run the work like an institution so it outlasts any one of us.

How the land came to us

The cabin · 2015

The tract came into the family four generations ago. In the 1940s our great-grandfather, known around Lampasas as Short, was farming wheat in Killeen when the federal government took his farm to build what became Fort Hood. He was compensated for it, moved to this ground in Lampasas County, and did here what he had always done: he grew wheat for seed, and by reputation some of the best wheat seed in the region. He grew broom straw during the war as well.

The land he took over was native trees and grasses over heavy cedar. The family story is that they strung ship-anchor chain between two tractors and dragged it across the ground to pull every tree out by the roots. Once it was cleared it was a wheat farm and a steady income for years. In the early ’60s Short and his kids, our grandfather and great-aunts, built the cabin down by the river. The family actually lived across the field and across the dirt road on separate land, running goats and sheep and cutting hay. The cabin was the other thing, a place to cool off in the river after a day in the fields. They named it “Short’s Resort,” and our great-aunts hand-painted the sign that still hangs on it. It has never had running water or electricity. For years propane ran a refrigerator, a stove, a heater and a few lamps, and only pieces of those are left. The outhouse washed away in a flood a long time ago.

Fallow, then leased for grazing

The working field · 2026

When Short retired from farming he let the field go mostly fallow and leased it for cattle. By the standards we hold now it was grazed harder than the ground could carry, which was the common practice of the day, and there was no fence keeping the cattle off the river. The banks eroded, and so did the drainage corridor through the middle of the field. Manure ran off, seasonal floods pushed through, and between the two the big old trees went down while almost nothing new came up behind them. Wild pigs and white-tailed deer ran unchecked on top of it. When Short passed and our grandfather took over, the land was kept the same way for years, because that’s how it had always been done.

That started to change on a trip out to work on the old cabin, when the state of the ground was too plain to ignore. 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 washout through the field kept going.

The Tifton years, and the turn

Tifton 85 · 2026

Eventually the cattle came off entirely and our grandfather planted the field in Tifton 85 bermudagrass, on USDA advice at the time. It’s a low-maintenance grass that can 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 most of the property, which nobody intended, and it pushed out the native grasses, shrubs and trees, and with them the dove, quail and raptors that used to use this 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, swimming in the cool Lampasas, and taking our first deer on this ground. Since 2023 we have been building the plan that is now underway: kill off the Tifton monoculture and return the ground to native trees, grasses and woody shrubs, bring back the birds and the riparian woodland species, slow the erosion as much 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 later the cabin is still standing, and this is just the next phase of taking care of the same ground.

An institution (kind of)

Much like our imaginative great-grandparents before us, who created the “resort,” we created an “institution” to carry out the land restoration. The station is organized into departments: Forestry & Fire, Water & Power, Wildlife Affairs, Agriculture & Grazing, Hospitality, and the Office of the Steward, each with its own seal and its own patch of responsibility. It is smaller than that sounds, mostly one family. But the structure is the point. It keeps the work legible, it hands off cleanly, and it keeps the records honest past any single season, any one set of hands, or even the next generation that inherits this land.

How it’s supported

We get help paying for this, and we want to be straight with you about how. Converting an income-producing hay field to native prairie is both labor- and cost-intensive, and it was a big decision for our family to make. Two grants cover a good chunk of the initial phases. Cost-share comes through the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service under the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (NRCS EQIP), run through the Lampasas County field office. The 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 money should leave a public trail, so practices and outcomes get posted in the Field Journal as each one is finished.