The Night Bee Cave Road Was Paved

A road, a lodge, and a third partner

For most of the nineteenth century, Bee Cave Road was a wagon trail that climbed steeply out of the Colorado River valley and threaded west through cedar country. By 1931, when Travis County finally contracted to pave the road, a stone hunting lodge already sat on a ridge eight miles out — visible from a long way off, but reachable only by automobile owners who didn't mind their suspensions.

The pavement changed everything. Within a year, Emmett and Polk Shelton had partnered with Mervin Ash — by reputation the king pin of Austin gamblers — to rehabilitate the old Moose Head Lodge and reopen it as something between a roadhouse and a nightclub. Ash brought the gambling tables. The Sheltons brought the ranch hands and the labor. Bee Cave Road brought the customers, who could now make the drive in an evening.

The Vegas of Westlake

For a few years in the early 1930s, the lodge was the place to be. Electric lights eight miles out a dirt road were a small miracle in themselves, and the dance floor and dining room were full most nights of the week. The lodge took on a new name in this period — Cedar Crest Night Club — and the building has changed names twice more since: most recently, as County Line on the Hill, where the ridge-top setting still defines the experience.

Emmett Shelton recorded these recollections in the early 1990s. The full story of his relationship with Mervin Ash, and of the transformation of the lodge, is preserved in the Our Westlake podcast — and now in this archive.