Charles Lewis McGehee Cabin
San Marcos, Hays County, Texas
Marker Inscription
The McGehee family came to Texas from Alabama in 1847. In 1859, Charles Lewis McGehee, Jr. (1837-1929) acquired this property along the San Marcos River. He soon built a cabin (1/2 mi. E) for his wife, Sarah Jane (Humphreys), and their children. One of the oldest existing structures in this part of Hays County, the cabin features a fireplace and chimney of hand-hewn stone. About 1870, McGehee moved his family from the farm into the town of San Marcos, where he worked as a land developer and stock dealer. (1985)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In 1847 the McGehee family left Alabama for the fresh farmland of newly annexed Texas, and by 1859 Charles Lewis McGehee, Jr. had claimed a stretch of the San Marcos River. The cabin he raised for his wife Sarah Jane and their children — with its hand-hewn stone fireplace and chimney — remains one of the oldest structures in this corner of Hays County, a survivor of the era when settlers turned river bottoms into homesteads before drifting into town life.
Why it matters
Modest cabins like this one are the physical record of Anglo-American settlement in the Texas Hill Country, marking the transition from frontier farm to established community in the years before the Civil War.
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Related people
- · Charles Lewis McGehee, Jr.
- · Sarah Jane Humphreys McGehee
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Site of the First Town of San Marcos
San Marcos, TX
Officially named Villa de San Marcos de Neve, this settlement was founded by Mexican colonists in 1807 and counted just 81 residents at the start of 1808. A devastating flood that year, followed by repeated raids, made the site untenable, and the villagers abandoned it by 1812. Its brief life marks the first attempt to plant a town on the San Marcos River.
Don Felipe Roque de la Portilla
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In 1807, at the request of Spanish Texas's governor, the Army captain and rancher Felipe Roque de la Portilla led more than fifty settlers to found San Marcos de Neve where El Camino Real crossed the San Marcos River. The colony issued town lots and built homes around a plaza, but floods, missing supplies, and raids by Comanches and Tonkawas broke it; by 1812 Portilla led his people back toward the Rio Grande. He remained a prominent frontier leader, later helping establish another Texas colony.
McGehee Crossing
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This spot marks where the Camino Real—the King's Highway from Nacogdoches to the Rio Grande—forded the San Marcos River. The French explorer St. Denis traveled it in 1714 to open trade with the Spanish, and the Austins likely crossed near here during their 1820–21 colonization efforts. Thomas McGehee settled on the east bank around 1846, and the family's long association gave the crossing its name.
Charles Cock Home
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Charles S. Cock built this limestone house in 1867, in the years when San Marcos was still a young frontier town finding its feet after the Civil War. A farmer who later served as mayor in the early 1880s, Cock raised his home from a mix of local materials—limestone, elm, pine, and cedar—the kind of hand-gathered construction typical of the Texas Hill Country.