King's Highway - Camino Real - Old San Antonio Road

San Antonio, TX

El Camino Real, the "King's Highway," followed ancient Indian and buffalo trails and stretched roughly a thousand miles from Mexico to Louisiana, its central section blessed by Domingo Terán de los Ríos, Texas's first governor, in 1691. For generations priests, soldiers, traders, and settlers traveled this "Trail of the Padres" linking the Spanish missions of East Texas, and San Antonio grew as a major stop along it. Moses Austin followed the road here in 1820 seeking colonization rights, and later Anglo settlers knew it as the "old San Antonio Road"; in 1915 the state and groups like the DAR marked its route with granite posts.

San Antonio, TX

An acequia is a communal gravity-fed irrigation ditch, a system Spanish colonists brought to Texas and the greater Southwest and adapted from centuries of Iberian and North African practice. San Antonio's Spanish missions, founded in the early 1700s, depended on a network of these ditches — the acequias madre and their branches — to water fields and sustain settlement in the semi-arid landscape. The "acequia de arriba," or upper ditch, was one strand of that lifeline, and the community associations that governed water-sharing were among the region's earliest civic institutions.

San Antonio, TX

When the railroad reached San Antonio in 1877, new neighborhoods rose on the high ground near San Pedro Springs. Here, cotton broker Roy Hearne and his wife Madge — a granddaughter of Sam Houston — built a home in the 1910s, hiring architect Atlee B. Ayres and contractor Eugene Davis. Its eclectic blend of prairie, craftsman, mission, and neoclassical styles, from granite and green tile roof to original mosaic floors, reflects the confident taste of the railroad-era city.

San Antonio, TX

This crossing over the San Antonio River was the main ford between the town of San Fernando de Bexar and the Alamo, and history clustered around it for centuries. At its footbridge on February 23, 1836, Alamo emissary Albert Martin parleyed with Santa Anna's aide Juan Almonte in the opening days of the siege; later the span drew travelers and writers, and bore a famously trilingual sign warning German, Mexican, and Anglo riders—each in their own tongue—not to gallop across. The present structure replaced an 1880 iron bridge, still linking the old city to the new.