Kellner Townsite

Pattison, TX

At the crossing of the Atascosito Road and the San Felipe Trail, James Tarrant Pattison and his wife Sarah settled a Republic of Texas land grant that grew into a 5,000-acre plantation with its own grist mill, sawmill, and cotton gin. The homesite doubled as a stagecoach stop, and the Pattisons founded the community's first church and school. The town that grew up here took the founder's name, and his heirs still live on the land.

San Felipe, TX

When Stephen F. Austin was planting his colony in the mid-1820s, travel meant following wagon ruts and notched trees through the Texas wilderness. Within a decade San Felipe had become a crossroads from which eight or more roads radiated, tying into great arteries like the San Antonio Road and the Atascosita Road to the United States. Yet even the main routes were dust in summer and impassable bog in winter — a reminder of how hard-won overland travel was before the modern highway era.

Fulshear, TX

The land here was granted in 1824 to Churchill Fulshear, one of Stephen F. Austin's "Old 300" colonists. His son, a veteran of the Texas War for Independence, built a four-story brick mansion in the 1850s and bred and raced horses; his protégé John Huggins went on to train the first American horse to win the English Derby. The town itself was platted in 1890 when the San Antonio & Aransas Pass Railroad arrived, quickly becoming a local trade center.

Sealy, TX

In 1879 railroad agent George Sealy bought nearly 12,000 acres from the old township of San Felipe de Austin to establish a depot, and the town of Sealy quickly grew up around it. The cemetery recorded its first burial—an infant, Annie Fowlkes—in 1883, and families bought plots from the railroad until the company donated the land to trustees in 1887. A ladies' society organized in 1904 rallied community support, even launching a Christmas bazaar that became a beloved local tradition.