King's Highway - Camino Real - Old San Antonio Road
New Braunfels, Comal 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
The King's Highway — El Camino Real, later called the Old San Antonio Road — was the great overland artery laid out under Spanish rule to link the missions and presidios of Texas with the interior of New Spain. For generations it carried soldiers, priests, traders, and eventually Anglo colonists across the Texas frontier. In 1918 the Daughters of the American Revolution and the State of Texas set a chain of markers along its route to keep the old road from being forgotten.
Why it matters
This route stitched together the Spanish, Mexican, and early Texan chapters of the region's history, making it one of the oldest and most important corridors of travel in the American Southwest.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
To understand this marker, you have to stand at the edge of an empire. In the late 1600s, Spain governed a vast, thinly held frontier called New Spain, and Texas was its far northeastern rim — a land Spain wanted to claim before France, pressing west from Louisiana, could take it first. The answer was a road. Beginning around 1690, Spanish soldiers and Franciscan friars blazed a route from the Rio Grande up through San Antonio and on toward the missions of East Texas, near the border of French Louisiana.
That road became the King's Highway — El Camino Real, the "royal road." It was less a paved highway than a braided set of trails following reliable water, easy river crossings, and the paths Native peoples had walked for centuries. For well over a hundred years it was the main artery of Spanish, and later Mexican, Texas.
By the time German immigrants founded New Braunfels here in 1845 — led by Prince Carl of Solms-Braunfels, in the well-watered country where the Comal and Guadalupe rivers meet — the old road running past this spot was already more than a century and a half old. New arrivals were building a new town astride one of the oldest travel corridors on the continent.
People & events
No single hero built this road. It was made by movement — by the friars carrying the faith into the missions, by presidial soldiers escorting supply trains, by traders, ranchers, and eventually the Anglo and European colonists who followed the same ruts west. Each generation deepened the track a little more.
By the early twentieth century, though, that living highway was fading into ranch fences and county lanes, and the people who had used it were passing from memory. In 1918 the Daughters of the American Revolution joined with the State of Texas to fix its course in stone, setting a chain of markers along the historic route so it could not simply be plowed under and forgotten.
That act of remembrance is its own small chapter of history. It came from a generation that felt the frontier receding and wanted to hold onto it — to say, in the middle of a world war year, that this quiet stretch of Texas had once carried empires.
Its place in the American story
El Camino Real is one of the oldest overland roads in what became the United States, and it tells an American story that begins in Spanish, not English. Long before wagon trains rolled west on the Oregon or Santa Fe trails, this road was already knitting together missions, presidios, and settlements across the Southwest.
Because it endured through three sovereignties — Spanish, then Mexican, then the Republic and State of Texas — the road is a physical timeline of how this region changed hands. Walk its route and you are tracing the seam where New Spain met the expanding United States.
Its importance is now formally recognized: the corridor is honored as the El Camino Real de los Tejas National Historic Trail, a reminder that America's beginnings run in more than one language and more than one direction.
If you visit
You will not find a grand ruin here — that is part of the point. This is hill-country Texas near New Braunfels, where clear rivers cut through limestone and German heritage still flavors the town's food, festivals, and family names. The marker asks you to imagine, not to gawk.
Stand near it and picture the traffic that once passed: a friar on a mule, a creaking oxcart of supplies, a family of colonists eyeing new land. The modern road you drove in on very likely follows, more or less, the path their feet and wheels wore into the ground.
Make it a slow stop on a Texas road trip rather than a quick photo. New Braunfels rewards a lingering afternoon by the water, and knowing you are sitting beside a 300-year-old highway turns an ordinary drive into a journey along one of the continent's original routes.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Daughters of the American Revolution
Themes & tags
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King's Highway - Camino Real - Old San Antonio Road
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This marker stands along the old King's Highway, or El Camino Real, the Spanish colonial road that became known as the Old San Antonio Road. Blazed to connect Texas missions and presidios with the heart of New Spain, it served for well over a century as a lifeline of travel and settlement. In 1918 the Daughters of the American Revolution and the State of Texas placed markers like this one to trace its historic path.
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