The county seat of Guadalupe County, Seguin was laid out in 1838 and originally was named Walnut Springs. It was renamed in 1839 in honor of Texas patriot Juan N. Seguin, who captained the only Tejano (Texas-born Mexicans) unit to fight at the battle of San...
Historically and architecturally one of the more important county seats in the region, Gonzales was founded in 1825 by empresarioGreen C. DeWitt as the capital of his colony, the first Anglo-American settlement west of the Colorado River. Abandoned in...
Founded in 1887 on land donated by Henry B. Shiner for the San Antonio and Aransas Pass Railway, Shiner was settled by Czech and German immigrants. Agriculture remains important in the area, along with cattle and poultry. Today the town is best known as the home of...
Founded in 1833, Hallettsville became the seat of Lavaca County in 1852. The town was named after Margaret Hallett, widow of John H. Hallett, one of Stephen F. Austin's 300, who donated the land for the townsite. The population of the town in...
Founded in 1873 by Gustav Schleicher, surveyor for the Gulf, Western Texas and Pacific Railway, Cuero was the midpoint on the line from the port at Indianola to San Antonio. It became the county seat of DeWitt County in 1876. The layout of the town reflects its...
The rather unassuming rural community of Panna Maria is of major significance as the first permanent settlement founded by Polish immigrants in the United States. Founded in 1854 at the confluence of the San Antonio River and Cibolo Creek, the site was...
Located five miles north of Panna Maria, Cestohowa was founded in 1873 by a group of about forty families who moved north from Panna Maria. The two communities were closely connected, sharing the same parish priest for religious services for five years....
The seat of Wilson County, Floresville was founded in 1867, and was named in honor of Canary Island immigrant Francisco Flores de Abrego, who established his ranch in the vicinity in the late eighteenth century. In 1883 the San Antonio and Aransas...
The seat of Comal County, New Braunfels was founded in 1845, the earliest of the German immigrant communities sponsored by the Adelsverein, the Society for the Protection of German Immigrants in Texas. The society was formed by twenty-one German noblemen in...
The county seat of Kendall County, Boerne was founded in 1852 and the town plan was laid out in an irregular grid pattern by Gustav Theissen and John James. The town was named in honor of German poet Ludwig Boerne. Located on the banks of Cibolo Creek, Boerne was...
This tiny community, barely more than the string of farmhouses observed there in the 1850s by Frederick Law Olmsted in his A Journey Through Texas (1859), is distinguished by its arrangement between the parallel banks of East and West Sister creeks,...
Founded in 1854, Comfort was laid out by Ernst Altgelt, who later lived in San Antonio ( SA70). The town was settled by German immigrants after the 1848 revolution failed, who organized the community as a...
Fredericksburg was founded in 1845 by John Meusebach, who purchased a ten-thousand-acre tract of land in the Hill Country about eighty miles north of New Braunfels. The town was laid out by Hermann Wilke and named in honor of Prince Frederick of Prussia...
The seat of Kerr County, Kerrville was founded in 1856. Divided by the Guadalupe River, the southern portion of the town rises dramatically above the river on a series of bluffs. Kerrville was served by the San Antonio and Aransas Pass Railway by 1887 and was...
Castroville is one of the oldest settlements in South Central Texas, established as an Alsatian immigrant community by empresarioHenri Castro in 1844 on a grant from the Republic of Texas. There were, though, settlers from other parts of France, as...
Hondo was founded in 1881 by the Galveston, Harrisburg and San Antonio Railway, and was originally known as Hondo City. Hondo became the county seat of Medina County in 1892 when Castroville refused to grant concessions to the railroad and was bypassed. The layout...
Uvalde and the county it serves were named in honor of Spanish colonial governor Juan de Ugalde, his last name Anglicized to Uvalde. The town of Uvalde was founded by Reading W. Black in 1855 and surveyed by Wilhelm Thielepape with four central squares. The town's...
The town of George West was founded in 1912 and was named by its founder, George Washington West, who donated the land for the site. The county government relocated here from Oakville in 1914. Texas folklorist J. Frank Dobie was born in 1888 on the family...
The triangular landmass at the southern tip of Texas is shaped by three waterways that defined its historical development. The Nueces River was the northern boundary between the Spanish provinces of Texas and Nuevo Santander, a boundary still regarded as a cultural defining line. To...
Located on a crescent-shaped bay in the Gulf of Mexico, Corpus Christi is defined by its port. Unlike Brownsville, with neighboring Matamoros as its economic role model, or Laredo, with its colonial past linked to established trade routes, Corpus Christi was...
Reached by a two-lane road through the rolling fields of the Nueces River valley, San Patricio de Hibernia was named in honor of the patron saint of Ireland. Founded in 1830, the town was part of a land grant awarded by the Mexican...
Kingsville, an urban extension of the King Ranch lands ( KA12), owed its creation, design, and development to its astute benefactors, Henrietta M. King, historically named its “founding mother,” and...
Surrounded by the grazing pastures of La Parra Ranch established by Mifflin Kenedy, Captain King's partner, Sarita connects the countywide ranch to the outside world. Together with the Kings, the Kenedy family donated right-of-way to the St. Louis,...
The Brooks County seat is situated near La Mota de Falfurrias, an oak grove that historically served as a spring source for Indians and Spanish colonizers. Acquired by agricultural entrepreneur Edward C. Lasater, the oak grove became the...
In an area without a link to a historic trade route, Hebbronville was founded in 1883 as a stopping point for the Texas Mexican Railway before its terminus at Laredo fifty miles to the west. Laid out in a twenty-block grid, the rail stop was created and...
Created as a stop on the Texas Mexican Railway, the town was laid out in the ranchlands donated by Don Plácido Benavides. Founded in 1880, its population was drawn from nearby ranching settlements whose residents came to partake in the new rail...
On the southward turn of the Texas Mexican Railway line, San Diego and its outlying area included ranching settlements that predated the incorporation of Texas into the United States in 1848. Spanish land grants were issued to the north and south of San Diego...
Named after Richard King's youngest daughter, Alice owed its fortunes to its location at the junction of two major rail lines. During the 1870s, the epic decade of cattle drives out of South Texas, the area of the future town was a key cattle assembly point...
La Villa de San Agustín de Laredo was founded in 1755 by Don Tomás Sánchez de la Barrera y Garza during the colonizing campaign of Don José de Escandón begun in 1746. More a ranching outpost than a town in its first decades, Laredo was the only community founded on the...
Founded in 1830 as a ranch headquarters on a small bluff on the north bank of the Rio Grande, San Ygnacio is more a part of Mexico than the United States. Socially and culturally it is tied to the now-abandoned south bank community of Guerrero...
