From Tuff to Impossible
A Century in the Texas Hill Country
Memoir • All Ages • Black & White Illustrations from Photos • Coming Fall 2026
From dusty Hill Country roads and one-room schoolhouses to border adventures, ranch life, colorful relatives, and unforgettable neighbors, Herbert Stewart captures the people and places that shaped his family and a disappearing way of life.
Drawn from newspaper columns written over many years and woven into a single narrative memoir, these true stories span nearly a century of Texas history. Some are hilarious, some heartbreaking, and many are so improbable you’ll wonder whether they can possibly be true. (As Herb says, “They believed it!”)
Whether you grew up in Texas or simply enjoy authentic family stories told with warmth, humor, and a gift for remembering the remarkable in ordinary people, From Tuff to Impossible invites you to pull up a chair and stay awhile.
By Herbert L. Stewart
Edited by Carma Stewart Paden
Charlie & Clarence Stewart, Herb’s uncle and dad
Read the Prologue!
Back to Tuff
Momma’s first ’membrunces were centered on the small community of Tuff, where she lived from before her first birthday until after her sixth. Tuff stands in Bandera County near Elam Creek, twenty-five miles west of the county seat and roughly seventy-five miles northwest of San Antonio.
The name “Tuff” originated, according to local lore, when the area’s citizens petitioned for a post office in 1901. When asked what name they wanted for the new town, the men scratched their heads. Then one said, “Don’ rightly know what name t’use, but I’ll tell y’one thing fer shore, it’s a mighty tuff place t’live an make a livin’.”
Whereupon the official exclaimed: “Okay, let’s jist name ’er Tuff!” They did.
In July 1999, when she was ninety years old, I took Momma back to a mostly vanished Tuff. We drove back and forth through the hills, searching, for the better part of the morning. I don’t know why it took so long; it had only been a little over eighty-three years since she left … in a three-wagon train.
She had only visited the area once since leaving, with two of her sisters, Jessie and Lola. In 1948, they took their mother (my Grannie Penland) to the West Prong Cemetery to visit the grave of Little Jack, the eighth of her eleven children and the first to die, at age seven in 1914. They didn’t go “downtown” or try to find the log cabin where they had lived from 1910 to 1916.
“Downtown” was the Tuff General Store and Post Office, all of seven hundred square feet. When Momma and I visited, the building had been vacant for decades. The owner, a retired teacher out of San Antonio, had pretty much just left it alone, so its appearance was much the same as the last time Momma saw it. To Momma and her family, it represented the center of civilization. It was their only link to the outside world in an era when there were almost no cars or paved roads, no radio or television, no telephones. Everything Momma’s family bought—which wasn’t much—came from this cypress structure, owned by the Sutton family.
The Post Office operated out of the General Store from 1901 to 1926, after which Tuff disappeared from most maps. Before 1901, people went to Medina for their mail. After 1926, the mail was delivered on a route. Still is.
We finally found it and just sat in the car for several minutes in front of the weather-beaten structure beside the dusty adobe road. Momma was as silent as a country cemetery at midnight, as was I. She stared hard at the wide weather-beaten cypress planks and the surrounding adobe limestone and flint rock hills thick with cedar, oak, cactus, and an occasional patch of stringy dry grass.
I watched her out of the corner of my eye while also studying the building. On the door leading into the main section was a sign reading Genral Store. Faintly legible on the door of the small side room was U.S. Post Office Tuff Texas.
After what seemed an eternity, Momma very slowly opened the car door and stepped out. She walked to within fifteen steps of the building, still studying it intently. Then, at a snail’s pace, she turned a complete circle, twice, measuring the surroundings.
Softly, with a great deal of emotion, she murmured, “This is it, boy! But it shore looked bigger eighty-sum year ago.”
Momma back in Tuff at the General Store