711 Ranch
Spring Branch, Comal County, Texas
Marker Inscription
WWI veteran L.A. Nordan (1896-1969) was a successful oil and gas producer in south Texas. In 1949, he and his wife, Pearl (Neugent) Nordan (1896-1994), established the 711 Ranch in Comal County along the Guadalupe River, 18 miles northwest of New Braunfels. The ranch was named after Nordan's downtown San Antonio business address. He was appointed to the Texas State Parks Board in 1951. The Nordans contributed generously to education, the arts, their church, and medical research. Starting in the 1850s, this area was part of the Fischer Store, Rebecca Creek and Cranes Mill settlements. In eight transactions between 1949 and 1966, the Nordans purchased 51 parcels of property rooted in 35 individual land grants awarded between 1837 and 1888 to Republic of Texas patriots, railroads, Mexican Texans, and German and Swiss immigrants. The ranch extended from North Cranes Mill Road west to Devils Hollow and one mile south of the river over 7.5 miles northward. The Nordans created a world-class ranching operation, producing prize-winning Santa Gertrudis cattle and Columbia sheep. They focused on conservation, wildlife preservation and education. They valued their many talented, long-term employees. The ranch owners took care to preserve Ninteenth-century structures and cemeteries located on the sprawling property. From 1961 to 1963, almost 2,000 acres were acquired by the U.S. government for the Canyon Lake Reservoir. In 1999, some 7,180 acres of ranch land was sold and soon became the Mystic Shores subdivision. The contributions of L.A. and Pearl Nordan significantly added to the rich heritage of the area. (2019)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
After building a fortune in South Texas oil and gas, World War I veteran L.A. Nordan and his wife Pearl established the sprawling 711 Ranch along the Guadalupe River in 1949, stitching together dozens of parcels rooted in Republic of Texas land grants once held by patriots, immigrants, and Mexican Texans. The Nordans built a world-class operation famous for prize Santa Gertrudis cattle and Columbia sheep, while championing conservation, wildlife, and the preservation of the property's old structures and cemeteries. Portions were later absorbed into Canyon Lake Reservoir and, eventually, a modern subdivision.
Why it matters
The 711 Ranch shows how mid-twentieth-century Texas ranching blended big-business ambition with land stewardship, and how sprawling private ranches were steadily reshaped by reservoirs and suburban growth.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
By the middle of the twentieth century, Texas had become a place where fortunes made under the ground could be turned into empires on top of it. Oil and gas booms in the southern half of the state minted a generation of self-made businessmen, and many of them poured their new wealth into the oldest form of Texas standing: the ranch. Cattle and land still carried a prestige that no office tower could match.
The hill country northwest of New Braunfels, where the Guadalupe River cuts through limestone and cedar, had a much older story. Since the 1850s this had been a patchwork of small frontier communities — the settlements once known as Fischer Store, Rebecca Creek, and Cranes Mill — worked by families who had received their land through grants dating back to the days of the Republic of Texas.
Those grants told the whole mixed history of early Texas in miniature: parcels awarded between the late 1830s and the 1880s to Republic-era patriots, to railroad companies, to Mexican Texans, and to German and Swiss immigrants who had come seeking farmland. When a modern rancher assembled a great spread here, he was quite literally stitching that older map back together.
People & events
L.A. Nordan came of age in the era of the First World War, served, and afterward built his living as a successful oil and gas producer in South Texas. In 1949 he and his wife, Pearl, took the wealth from that work and did something enduring with it, founding a ranch along the Guadalupe River. They gave it a curious name — 711 — borrowed not from the land but from the number of his business address in downtown San Antonio.
Building the ranch was itself a feat of patience. Over eight separate transactions spread across nearly two decades, the Nordans bought up fifty-one parcels of property rooted in dozens of original land grants, knitting a sprawling operation out of ground that had belonged to patriots, immigrants, and railroads. The result stretched for miles, running north from near the river across ridges and hollows.
What the Nordans made of it set them apart. They raised prize-winning Santa Gertrudis cattle and Columbia sheep and ran the place as a serious, world-class operation, but they also treated the land as something held in trust — emphasizing conservation, protecting wildlife, and valuing employees who stayed for the long haul. They deliberately preserved the old nineteenth-century structures and the small cemeteries scattered across the property, refusing to erase the people who had come before them. Their generosity reached well beyond the fence lines, into education, the arts, their church, and medical research, and in 1951 Nordan was appointed to the state board overseeing Texas parks.
Its place in the American story
The story of the 711 Ranch is a distinctly American one about how new money meets old land. Across the postwar decades, wealth generated by modern industry flowed into ranching all over the West, and the most thoughtful owners became stewards as much as businessmen — proof that large-scale agriculture and conservation did not have to be enemies.
It is also a story about how the American landscape never stops being remade. Beginning in the early 1960s, roughly two thousand acres of the ranch were acquired by the federal government for the Canyon Lake reservoir, part of the great mid-century wave of dam and water projects that reshaped rivers across the country to control floods and supply growing cities.
The final chapter is one nearly every fast-growing American region now knows. At the close of the twentieth century, thousands of acres of ranch land were sold and became a residential subdivision. The open range that had absorbed so many older farms was itself absorbed by suburban growth — the same cycle of consolidation and subdivision that has quietly rewritten the map of the Sun Belt.
If you visit
Come here for the river and the ridgelines. This is Texas Hill Country at its most characteristic — limestone hills, dark green cedar, and the clear Guadalupe threading through it all. Standing near the marker, you are looking at country that was, within living memory, a single vast working ranch.
Let the geography tell the layered story. The nearby lake covers ground that was once pasture; the neighborhoods spreading across the hills sit on land that carried cattle and sheep. Reading the marker, you can mentally peel those layers back to the fenced range, and then back further to the scattered frontier settlements of the 1850s.
It makes a rewarding stop on a loop through the Hill Country north of New Braunfels, especially paired with time on the water. Slow down long enough to notice how many chapters of Texas history — grant, farm, ranch, reservoir, and suburb — are stacked in one stretch of river valley.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · L.A. Nordan
- · Pearl Neugent Nordan
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Fischer Homestead
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This homestead at the springs of Rebecca Creek sat on land granted to Texas pioneer James Baker for his service in the Texas War for Independence. German immigrant John Heinrich Fischer bought the tract in 1860 — likely running cattle there as early as 1857 — and raised his family on its vital water source. His daughter Anna and her husband William Klinger owned the homestead from 1881.
German Pioneers in Texas
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Between 1844 and 1847 a society of German nobles, the Mainzer Adelsverein, sponsored the emigration of thousands of Germans to Texas, who founded New Braunfels in 1845 and Fredericksburg in 1846. Pushing west, these farmers, artisans, scholars, and scientists endured epidemic and privation, and a treaty with the Comanche opened millions of acres between the Llano and Colorado rivers to settlement. Much of the land they first settled now lies beneath Canyon Lake.
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