In 1847, German immigrant Ottfried Hans von Meusebach (he subsequently Anglicized his name to John O. Meusebach), commissioner general of the Adelsverein (Society for the Protection of German Immigrants) and founder of Fredericksburg, negotiated a treaty with the Penateka Comanche about thirteen miles west of the future town. Ranchers and cotton farmers settled along the San Saba River in the mid-1850s, the county was organized in 1856, and a courthouse was built in 1857. The town grew slowly as the marketing center for the county’s agriculture, then increasing after the arrival of a branch line of the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railway in 1911, which coincided with the incorporation of the town. Although the Great Depression had little effect on business, the great drought of the mid-1950s brought economic decline. San Saba describes itself as the “Pecan Capital of the World.”
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