09/02/2026
You have probably had lunch on the Granbury square without ever knowing that the hotel on the corner was built up by two brothers who could not see it.
Jacob and Jesse Nutt were twins, and both of them had been blind since they were young. It did not keep them out of business. They ran a grocery, a saloon and a hotel right there on the square, and folks came to call the whole operation the Nutt House. By the family's own account it began in 1866 with a mercantile in a wooden building on that very spot.
Their younger brother David Lee Nutt had been born in Missouri in 1848 and came to Texas at eleven years old. In 1872 he married Sue Garland, whom everyone called Sudie, and in 1879 the two of them gave their home a name: the Nutt House Hotel. It was the first hotel Hood County ever had. The limestone building that still stands at 119 East Bridge Street went up in 1893 and had its grand opening that October, doing duty as a general store on the ground floor and a hotel above.
The family kept that second floor running as a hotel from 1916 all the way to 2001. A relative, Mary Lou Watkins, brought it back to life in 1970 and got the building onto the National Register.
Then in March of 2023 a fire tore through the upstairs and gutted it. The limestone walls stood. Richard Moore, Ike Thomas and Trisha Thomas put together the Nutt House Group, rebuilt everything that burned, and in the middle of November 2024 the doors opened again with eight suites upstairs and Christina's Restaurant downstairs.
So the corner two blind brothers built up, and that David Lee and Sudie Nutt turned into the first hotel in Hood County, is taking guests again tonight. Same square, same limestone, same address it has had since 1893.
