In the early morning of July 4 I awoke to darkness and lashing rain. It had been showering off and on for several days at our home in Fredericksburg, Texas, which is twenty-five miles northeast of Kerrville, but something about this storm felt different—ominous and unrelenting. The unimaginable news would come to light with the sun.
Like so many others I’ve been overwhelmed with heartache and disbelief following the recent floods that ravaged the Hill Country. I grieve for the region I call home, but mostly for the families who have been forever fractured. In Kerr County alone, 107 lost their lives, including 27 young girls and counselors at Camp Mystic.
I’m a native Texan, and many of my friends claim Mystic as their home away from home. Every summer, they forged their character, deepened their faith, and made lifelong bonds on the banks of the Guadalupe River. One of the camp’s time-honored traditions is the wearing of a charm bracelet from James Avery, a jewelry company founded in Kerrville seventy-one years ago. A James Avery bracelet is part of the uniform at Mystic—especially at Sunday worship—and a rite of passage for generations of Texas girls.
Though I spent my summers at a different Hill Country camp, collecting James Avery charms became a hobby of my own. Some days after the tragedy I found myself searching for my old bracelet, which had lain dormant in my jewelry box for years. I clasped it around my wrist and the jingling trinkets—a teakettle and a tennis racket, a birthday cake and a tiny cross—transported me back to my childhood like a sterling-silver time capsule. Wearing it again felt somehow healing and important, like an act of strength and solidarity, reflection and remembrance for the childhoods tragically cut short earlier this month.
I wasn’t alone in feeling that way. “That was the first thing I did after this happened—I thought, I need to dig out my charm bracelet,” says Lindsey Tognietti, who is the granddaughter of James Avery’s namesake founder and has worked for the brand for the past decade.
Without Camp Mystic, the company her “Grandaddy Jim” built might not exist. In 1954, Avery started making jewelry in the Kerrville garage of his mother-in-law, Gladys Ranger, who worked in the camp’s commissary and in turn sold her son-in-law’s pieces there. As young girls returned home bearing Avery’s treasures, “he became known as the Jeweler in the Hills,” Tognietti says. “It spread through the other camps, but there’s a deep Mystic connection here…that’s really the first place he went.”
Today the company operates 135 stores nationwide and sells all manner of baubles, but it still crafts specialty charms for Texas summer camps, including Waldemar, Kickapoo, and La Junta. Campers at Mystic have continued to arrive with their bracelets in hand and make pilgrimages to the Kerrville storefront after their sessions adjourn, eager to commemorate the summer’s adventures with a new addition—a silver guitar, an old-fashioned camera, a cheerleading megaphone, to name a few. “Especially at our Kerrville location, they have a tradition around it and a formula,” Tognietti explains. “The associates start by putting your camp tribe letter in the middle, then the cabin name and the year.”
For campers like Kerrville native Allie Lahourcade, the forty-plus charms she collected over her decade attending Camp Mystic required a necklace in lieu of a bracelet. “Each charm represents a memory,” she says. A glistening fish, for example, reminds her of baiting minnows and chicken gizzards in hopes of landing a sizable bass or catfish, while a small silver diver captures the fear she conquered doing back dives into the cool green water of the Guadalupe.
“My charm necklace is a story of my summers in the Hill Country, my favorite place in the world,” she says. “I’ve been sifting through my Mystic box and reaching for my necklace to reminisce on the joy, laughs, love, and people at Camp Mystic amid my heartache over the loss of lives and the destruction of my hometown.”
In Kerrville, where James Avery opened his first brick-and-mortar shop in 1967, the brand has committed $1 million to the recovery effort and is donating 100 percent of proceeds from its Deep in the Heart of Texas charm, purchased through August 4. The design, which also raised funds in 2017 after Hurricane Harvey, sold out within a day, though the website is still accepting back orders.
Even before these disasters, philanthropy was a hallmark of the company; the Kerrville visitors center displays a tapestry bearing Avery’s motto: “Giving is what it’s all about.” But this tragedy is deeply personal for the homegrown Hill Country company. “Everybody knows somebody who lost loved ones,” Tognietti says. “Our associates in manufacturing have found some hope by making the Deep in the Heart of Texas charms. It has been a small part of processing what happened in our community, and a way to help and channel their grief.”
For those making them and those wearing them, the tiny silver charms are a source of comfort when the loss feels enormous. The bracelet hanging heavily on my wrist jingles and chimes, announcing itself as a tangible celebration of life. While the charms are specific to my own story, together, they tie me to a larger tradition and a great, deep love for my home state. And there’s nothing small about that.
