King's Highway - Camino Real - Old San Antonio Road
Nacogdoches, Nacogdoches County, Texas
Marker Inscription
King's Highway - Camino Real - Old San Antonio Road. Marked by the Daughters of the American Revolution and the State of Texas A.D. 1918
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
This marker commemorates the historic overland route known variously as the King's Highway, El Camino Real, and the Old San Antonio Road — a corridor rooted in the Spanish colonial era that linked missions, settlements, and the wider Southwest across what became Texas. It was placed in 1918 by the Daughters of the American Revolution together with the State of Texas as part of a broad effort to mark the road's course.
Why it matters
El Camino Real was among the most important early routes into Texas, carrying settlers, soldiers, and trade for generations, and the 1918 marking project reflects an early wave of American historic preservation.
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Nearby & related markers
Captain Domingo Ramon
Nacogdoches, TX
In 1716 Captain Domingo Ramon led Spain's second attempt to plant a permanent settlement in East Texas, establishing a presidio and a cluster of missions near the Neches River in just weeks. The Hasinai Caddo tolerated and cooperated with the newcomers, who aimed to block illicit French trade pressing in from Louisiana. A minor French raid in 1719 scattered the fragile settlements, but the Ramon-Espinosa expedition had already helped open El Camino Real de los Tejas.
Site of "El Atascoso"
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In 1782 the Spanish official Antonio Gil Y'Barbo granted a league of land at El Atascoso to Nacogdoches citizen Miguel de Cordova for a ranch and farming. Straddling El Camino Real between the Mexican border and Louisiana, the rancho was a typical outpost of Spanish Texas and a busy site of trade—both legal and illegal—until it faded in the 1820s and gave way to a small settlement that lingered into the days of the Texas Republic.
Site of Pattonia
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Founded in 1844 by riverboat pilots Robert and Moses Patton, this vanished port sat at a bend of the Angelina River on land patented to Texas Revolution general Thomas J. Rusk. The brothers proved the river navigable with a keelboat, then bought the steamboat Angelina and ran regular trade, sending cotton downstream toward the Gulf and hauling supplies up to be wagoned overland to Nacogdoches. Silting sandbars, fallen logs and dropping water levels doomed the enterprise, and the coming of the railroads finished it; today nothing at all remains of Pattonia.
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Michael Costley, remembered as "The Father of Douglass," reached Texas in 1832, enlisted in the Texas Army, and patrolled the Old San Antonio Road before laying out a town he expected to flourish. A river port on the Angelina shipped its cotton to the Gulf and a stagecoach line came through, but Costley was shot dead in a 1837 gunfight before his vision fully took hold. Named for Republic of Texas congressman Kelsey Harris Douglass, the town grew into a modest but busy waystation of inns, shops, and churches on the road between the Angelina and Neches rivers.