The Old Saloon on Milam Street Changes Its Walls Ten Times a Year
September 10, 2026
September 10, 2026
Walk past 1014 Milam Street in downtown Columbus and you'll notice the building before you notice what's inside it. Four decorated steel columns hold up a Victorian storefront, the wood-frame windows are trimmed the way they would have been the year it went up, and a historical marker near the door tells you it dates to 1891. What the marker does not tell you is that this building spent almost three decades as the most dangerous address in town, and that it has now spent longer as an art gallery than it ever spent as a saloon.
That second fact is the one worth sitting with, because it changes how you should think about the place. The Live Oak Art Center isn't a quaint side stop that happens to occupy an old building. It's a working nonprofit exhibition space that turns its walls over roughly ten times a year, runs on a five-tier membership structure, and right now, this month, has a show up that didn't exist a year ago and won't exist again once it comes down.
Charles Brunson came to Columbus after immigrating from Germany in 1845 and working as a stage driver. In 1867 he opened a saloon on the courthouse square, and in 1891 he built the structure that still stands on Milam Street, adding an adjacent store five years later. The building did double duty as saloon and whiskey warehouse during a stretch of Columbus history when carrying a firearm in town was illegal for civilians, which meant men stashed their guns at their favorite saloon before heading in for the day. Brunson's became one of those depositories, and the arrangement got violent often enough that the city passed a resolution in 1906 restricting where weapons could be stored on any premises. Two men, Sam Reese and Larkin Hope, died in shootings connected to the saloon, casualties of the long-running Stafford-Townsend feud that shaped so much of Columbus's rougher history.
The saloon closed in 1919. For the next 67 years the building cycled through a series of retail tenants, nothing dramatic, until 1986, when a donor named Emma Hay funded its purchase for what was then called the Live Oak Art Club. That club had actually been around since 1954, meeting for more than three decades in the kitchen of the Live Oak Hotel before it ever owned a room of its own. The building was restored again in 2016 with funding from the Wade Family Foundation, this time specifically to preserve the old saloon and whiskey warehouse spaces rather than paper over them.
Run the arithmetic and the building has now operated as the Live Oak Art Center for 40 years, twelve longer than it ever operated as a saloon. Most people admiring the storefront on their way to dinner have that ratio backward in their heads.
It's easy to mistake LOAC for a community bulletin board with better lighting. The membership numbers say otherwise. The center currently lists 94 members across five giving tiers for its 2025-2026 program year: 40 individual members, 35 contributors, six patrons, five benefactors, and eight sustaining members. That's a dues structure, not a mailing list, and it funds an exhibition calendar of roughly ten shows a year, which works out to a new show landing on those walls faster than once every six weeks.
The center's own about page lays out the saloon history in more detail than most visitors ever ask for, and it's worth reading before you go if the building's past interests you as much as the paintings inside it.
One of the clearest windows into how the organization actually runs its calendar is the annual Members Art Show, which the center has hosted every August for years. The August 2025 edition hung 75 pieces from 25 of the center's members, and the reception drew artists like Daniel Poré, who started his career as a Base Graphic Specialist for the U.S. Air Force in the 1970s, moved to Columbus, and joined LOAC in 2006. President Renee Long described the exhibit's purpose in terms that get at what makes the center different from a gift shop with paintings on the wall.
"For a lot of these artists, this is the first time they've hung in a gallery," Long said, describing an exhibit built for local members rather than visiting names.
That's the difference between a gallery that imports finished reputations and one that builds them. The August show exists specifically to give Columbus's own residents a real gallery wall, sometimes for the first time in their lives.
This is the part that changes depending on when you read it, which is exactly the point. As of this September, the second-floor Laura Ann Rau Gallery is holding the center's youth art show, the result of an entry process that closed back in April. That same upstairs room spent June and July as the classroom for LOAC's Art Stars summer camp, an eight-week run of weekly day sessions for kids five and up. The space gets repurposed constantly, camp room to show gallery to camp room again, on a schedule most people walking by on Milam Street never see.
Earlier this year, in June, the center also brought in Stephen Henry, the 2026 first-place winner of the Paint Texas! general competition, to teach a two-day watercolor workshop open to any skill level. That kind of programming, a working juried-competition winner teaching a $300 workshop in a former whiskey warehouse, is not what most people picture when they picture a small-county art club.
If you're trying to time a visit around what's actually on the walls rather than what you assume is on the walls, the pattern looks roughly like this across a typical year:
None of that shows up if you only know the building as the pretty Victorian storefront you drive past. The calendar is real, the turnover is fast, and admission has always been free, which means the only cost of catching a show before it comes down is knowing it's there.
The mistake people make with LOAC is treating it like a museum, something static you can visit once and check off. A museum's walls barely change. This building's walls change roughly every six weeks, which means the version of the Live Oak Art Center you remember from a visit two years ago is not the version standing there now, and the version you'd see if you stopped in today won't be there by Halloween. The saloon closed in 1919 and stayed closed for 67 years before this building found its second life. It has now held that second life for 40 years and counting, longer than most people in Columbus have been alive to remember it as anything else.
Hours listed across different directories don't fully agree with each other, some put the center open Wednesday through Saturday, others list slightly different weekday windows, so the safest move is checking the center's own site before you drive over. What won't be in dispute is that whatever's on the walls when you get there was chosen for that specific stretch of the calendar, not left up because nobody got around to changing it.
That's the version of downtown Columbus that Big Easy Ranch owners get to keep discovering: not a fixed postcard, but a small city's worth of turnover packed into a courthouse square, changing more often than anyone driving through would guess.
If this is the kind of texture you want in your daily life, not just the acreage and the golf course but the gallery on Milam Street with a new show every six weeks, Big Easy Ranch Living can walk you through what ownership here actually looks like. Request the Dream Book and schedule a private consultation, and we'll show you the rest of what the county seat has been quietly building.
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