Indian Sites on Cypress Creek
Center Point, Kerr County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Named "Sturdy Oak Farm" for an ancient live oak, this property has belonged to the Lich family since 1879. Mr. and Mrs. Ernst Perry Lich became the owners in 1945. Three significant prehistoric sites on this property indicate its importance for human habitation for at least 10,000 years. Tools from the sites represent several archaeological periods from Paleo-Indian through Archaic times. The sites are near spring-fed pools in Cypress Creek. Artifacts discovered at the three locations include arrowheads, knives, beads, and stone tools left by nomadic tribes that once wandered this area. (1978)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
On land the Lich family has held since 1879, three archaeological sites beside the spring-fed pools of Cypress Creek record human presence stretching back at least 10,000 years. Tools recovered here span the Paleo-Indian through Archaic periods, and finds include arrowheads, knives, beads, and stone implements. They mark the camps of nomadic peoples drawn, like all who followed, to this reliable water.
Why it matters
Sites like these anchor American history in a deep Indigenous past, showing that the land was home to skilled hunter-gatherers for millennia before written records began.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
Long before any written history of Texas, people lived in the Hill Country. The marker points to at least 10,000 years of human presence on this one property, a span that dwarfs everything else commemorated on most roadside markers. Archaeologists divide that deep past into periods, and the tools found here run from the Paleo-Indian era through the Archaic.
In broad terms, the Paleo-Indian period covers the earliest well-documented people in North America, highly mobile hunters living at the end of the last Ice Age. The long Archaic period that followed saw people adapt to a warming climate and a changing landscape, gathering plants, hunting smaller game and returning to reliable places year after year.
In the limestone Hill Country, dependable water was everything. The spring-fed pools of Cypress Creek would have drawn people through generation after generation, which is exactly why this spot holds traces of so many eras.
People & events
Most names on historical markers belong to individuals. The people at the heart of this one left no names. We know them through what they made and dropped: arrowheads, knives, beads and stone tools, found at three separate prehistoric sites near the creek's pools. The marker describes them as nomadic groups who moved through this country.
Every one of those objects represents skill. Shaping stone into a sharp, balanced point takes real expertise, and beads suggest people who cared about adornment and identity, not only survival. Finding tools from several periods here means that different peoples, separated by thousands of years, chose the same place for the same reasons.
The modern chapter is more recent. The property, called "Sturdy Oak Farm" after an ancient live oak, has belonged to the Lich family since 1879, and Mr. and Mrs. Ernst Perry Lich became its owners in 1945. The fact that these sites were recognized and marked in 1978 speaks to a family that understood what their land held.
Its place in the American story
It is easy to think American history starts with explorers, colonists or the founding of the republic. Sites like Cypress Creek make clear how much older the human story of this land is. For thousands of years before any European arrived, Indigenous peoples lived, hunted, gathered and made tools across the continent, including right here.
The span of the finds, from Paleo-Indian through Archaic times, reflects one of the great themes of North American prehistory: people adapting over millennia as the Ice Age ended and the land changed around them. Each layer of that story survives only where the ground has been left undisturbed.
This marker also shows that important archaeology often lies on private land, and that its survival depends on landowners who choose to protect it. The partnership between a family farm and the public record of Texas history is quietly significant in its own right.
If you visit
The sites themselves are on private family property, so enjoy them from the marker and the public roadside. Please do not wander onto the land or go looking for artifacts. Archaeological sites lose most of their meaning when objects are removed from where they lie, and the story here depends on them staying put.
From the marker, take in the setting: the Hill Country's rolling limestone, the live oaks, and the idea of spring-fed pools along Cypress Creek. Try to see the land as its earliest visitors might have, as a reliable source of water and shade in a country where both mattered enormously.
This stop fits nicely into a leisurely Kerr County drive near Center Point, especially if you are exploring the Hill Country's creeks and small towns. It is a brief stop that changes the scale of everything else you see on the trip, a reminder that the history behind every other marker is only the most recent sliver of a far longer human story.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
James Kerr
Kerrville, TX
James Kerr, a Kentucky-born veteran of the War of 1812 and former Missouri legislator, came to Texas in 1825 as surveyor general of Green DeWitt's colony and a member of Stephen F. Austin's "Old Three Hundred." He selected the site of Gonzales and named it for the governor of Coahuila, endured the deaths of his first wife and children, and spent decades as a surveyor, Texas Ranger major, and delegate to the conventions that steered Texas toward independence. In 1856 pioneer Joshua Brown gave land here so that Kerr County would bear his old friend's name.
Old Spanish Trail
Kerrville, TX
The Old Spanish Trail threaded through the Hill Country from San Antonio past Bandera Pass, Camp Verde, and Kerrville, a route used for centuries by Comanches and Lipan Apaches. In 1732 Spanish forces under Juan Antonio Bustillo y Cebalos fought the Apaches at Bandera Pass, and over following decades soldiers, missionaries, and adventurers followed the trail toward the San Sabá country and its rumored silver. By the 1850s Camp Verde and Camp Ives anchored military patrols along the same ancient path.
Penateka Comanches
Center Point, TX
The Penateka, or "honey eaters," were the southernmost band of the Comanche, ranging across the Edwards Plateau and following the buffalo on which they depended for food, clothing, and shelter. Renowned horsemen, they made settlement west of this area perilous for decades. Pressure from Texas Rangers and the U.S. Army's Second Cavalry, reservation removals, and the Red River War of 1874–75 forced the Comanche onto reservation lands, where the breakup of holdings in 1901 scattered the people — who have since worked to rebuild their shared culture.
Gatlin Site
Kerrville, TX
When crews built the Spur 98 bridge over the Guadalupe River in 2004, they uncovered an extraordinary Native American site with stone tools and projectile points older than 7,500 years—predating Egypt's earliest dynasties. For thousands of years, small bands of hunter-gatherers returned to these banks to harvest fruits, nuts, and roots and to hunt bison, deer, and rabbit, cooking in limestone ovens they built themselves. Radiocarbon dating shows people camped here across more than six millennia in a cooler, wetter Edwards Plateau.