King's Highway - Camino Real - Old San Antonio Road
San Marcos, Hays 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 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.
Why it matters
The road links the Spanish colonial founding of Texas to its later Mexican and American eras, tracing a corridor of migration that shaped the settlement of the Southwest.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
Roads in early Texas did not go where planners drew lines; they went where the water was. That single fact explains why the King's Highway — El Camino Real, the royal road of Spanish Texas — passed through the country around San Marcos. Blazed beginning around 1690 to link the missions and presidios of New Spain, the route hugged dependable rivers, springs, and safe crossings, because a traveler on the frontier lived or died by the next reliable drink.
This part of Hays County sits along the eastern edge of the Texas Hill Country, where the land breaks and clear water rises from the ground. To a colonial traveler pushing north from San Antonio toward the East Texas missions, such a place was not scenery — it was survival, a natural stopping point on a long and dangerous road.
For more than a century, under Spanish and then Mexican rule, this was the main overland corridor of Texas. The road here was old and well worn long before the modern town took shape around it.
People & events
The story of this road is really the story of everyone who traveled it. Spanish friars carried religion and record-keeping into the wilderness. Presidial soldiers guarded the mule trains and mail. Traders hauled goods, ranchers drove stock, and later waves of settlers followed the same trace looking for land. The King's Highway was the frontier's Main Street, stretched over hundreds of miles.
But a route kept alive by constant use can also die from disuse, and by the early 1900s the old road was dissolving into private property and half-remembered local lore. In 1918 the Daughters of the American Revolution and the State of Texas set out to save it — placing markers like this one to pin the historic path to the map before it vanished for good.
That marking campaign was an early act of American historic preservation, undertaken by people who understood that a road is a fragile kind of monument. Neglect it and it disappears; mark it and it becomes a story you can stand inside.
Its place in the American story
This is one of the oldest travel corridors in the United States, and it reframes how we usually tell the national story. The familiar version starts on the Atlantic coast and moves west. The King's Highway starts in the Spanish south and moves north and east — a reminder that European settlement of this continent came from more than one direction and spoke more than one language.
Because it carried Texas through its Spanish, Mexican, and American eras in turn, the road is a corridor of migration and change. The people who used it helped populate and shape the whole Southwest, long before it flew a U.S. flag.
Today the route is honored as the El Camino Real de los Tejas National Historic Trail, part of the country's official memory. It says plainly that America's roots are older and more tangled than the standard textbook opening suggests.
If you visit
San Marcos today is a lively college and river town, famous for the cool, spring-fed water that has drawn people to this spot for a very, very long time. That same abundance of water is the reason the old road came through here — so as you visit, let the landscape explain the history.
Don't expect a preserved roadway. The marker's job is to make you look twice at ordinary ground and realize that travelers, missionaries, and colonists once filed past on foot, horseback, and oxcart, choosing this route because the country gave them what they needed to survive.
It makes a rewarding pause on a Hill Country drive. Cool off by the river, then walk over to the marker and let the two experiences meet: the water that still pulls people to San Marcos is the same magnet that pulled a Spanish road through here three centuries ago.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Daughters of the American Revolution
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
King's Highway - Camino Real - Old San Antonio Road
New Braunfels, TX
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.
Wonder Cave
San Marcos, TX
Formed within the Balcones Fault by ancient earth movements, Wonder Cave sits in country long traveled by Native peoples and Spanish priests along the old Camino Real, with local legend adding tales of 1820s bandits and buried loot. Anglo-Texan settlers rediscovered it in 1893 when a water-well drill plunged 158 feet into the hollow beneath their home. By about 1900 it had become the state's first commercially opened cave, drawing visitors on candlelit tours.
Sanders-Grosgebauer House
San Marcos, TX
Built about 1913 on San Antonio Street—originally the stagecoach road to San Antonio—by S. H. and Annie Sanders, this American foursquare home passed to Albert and Rosa Grosgebauer in 1919. During his student days at the local college, future president Lyndon B. Johnson was often a dinner guest here. The house, an uncommon foursquare design for San Marcos, became a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1992.
McGehee Crossing
San Marcos, TX
This spot marks where the Camino Real—the King's Highway from Nacogdoches to the Rio Grande—forded the San Marcos River. The French explorer St. Denis traveled it in 1714 to open trade with the Spanish, and the Austins likely crossed near here during their 1820–21 colonization efforts. Thomas McGehee settled on the east bank around 1846, and the family's long association gave the crossing its name.