John A. & Mahala Jones Cemetery

Bandera, TX

For thousands of years this narrow gap in the hills between the Guadalupe and Medina valleys funneled travelers through the Texas Hill Country. Comanche and Apache trails converged here, a Swiss botanist recorded native burial customs at the pass in 1828, and by the 1840s it saw patrols and clashes between Texas Rangers and Native peoples. Later it carried U.S. Army surveyors mapping routes to California, then cattle drives up the Western Trail, and finally a state highway.

Bandera vicinity, TX

This gap through the mountains has been a celebrated crossing since the earliest days of Spanish settlement, linking the Medina and Guadalupe river country. Generations of frontier fighting and raiding passed through it, and it served as an old Texas Ranger trail as well as a U.S. Army route between frontier posts. Its narrow passage made it a natural chokepoint in the contested Hill Country.

Medina, TX

Built in 1870 for Fabian L. Hicks — a county official and Texas Ranger — this ranch house was styled after his family home in North Carolina, using stone and cypress cut from the ranch itself, with hardware freighted in by ox wagon from San Antonio. It replaced the log cabin the family had occupied since 1855, marking the shift from frontier survival to established Hill Country ranching.

Bandera, TX

Hendrick Arnold, a free Black man who fought in the Siege of Bexar and the Battle of San Jacinto, was granted land for his service in the Texas Revolution, including this Bandera County tract. He passed acreage to his family, and over generations the ground became a burial place—formally recorded in 1922 as a colored burial ground used by local African American families. Neglect erased many headstones, but research has recovered dozens of unmarked graves and the names of those laid to rest here.