King's Highway - Camino Real - Old San Antonio Road
Paige, Bastrop 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
Here ran the King's Highway — El Camino Real, later the Old San Antonio Road — the Spanish colonial route that bound the missions and presidios of Texas to the wider empire of New Spain. Travelers, missionaries, and colonists followed it across the frontier for generations. In 1918 the Daughters of the American Revolution joined with the State of Texas to mark its course for posterity.
Why it matters
As one of the oldest travel corridors in Texas, the road carried the region through its Spanish, Mexican, and American chapters and helped open the Southwest to settlement.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
This marker near Paige carries two different centuries inside it. The first is the age of the road itself. Beginning around 1690, Spain laid out the King's Highway — El Camino Real — to bind the missions and presidios of its Texas frontier to the heart of New Spain, running from the Rio Grande up through San Antonio and on toward the East Texas borderlands near French Louisiana. For generations it was the great overland lifeline of Spanish and Mexican Texas.
The second century is the one that put up the stone. This is Bastrop County, in the gentle farm country near the Lost Pines — that surprising island of tall loblolly pines rising out of the central Texas prairie. By the early 1900s the old road had faded to a memory here, its ruts swallowed by fields and fences.
So the marker stands at the meeting of a colonial road and a modern impulse to remember it: an ancient route, commemorated by a young nation that sensed how easily such things are lost.
People & events
Think first of the travelers the road was built for — the friars, soldiers, traders, and settlers who wore the route into the land over more than a hundred years, each passing party keeping the trail alive simply by using it.
Then think of the people who chose to save it. In 1918 the Daughters of the American Revolution, working with the State of Texas, set a chain of markers along the historic path. The date is worth pausing on: 1918 was a World War year, a moment when Americans were thinking hard about national identity and sacrifice. In the middle of that, a patriotic society and a state government decided it mattered to fix an old Spanish road in stone.
That decision is the human drama of this particular spot. It was not about a battle or a famous name; it was a deliberate act of memory — ordinary citizens insisting that the frontier's forgotten highway deserved to be honored before it disappeared entirely.
Its place in the American story
The King's Highway is among the oldest overland roads in the United States, and it carries a truth the national story often underplays: that the settlement of this continent came from the Spanish south as much as the English east. This road was busy generations before the great westward trails of American legend.
Having served Texas across its Spanish, Mexican, and American chapters, the route is a corridor of migration that helped open the whole Southwest to settlement. The people who traveled it laid groundwork the United States would later inherit.
The 1918 marking effort connects to a larger national movement, too — the era when Americans began preserving their historic places on purpose. Today the corridor is recognized as the El Camino Real de los Tejas National Historic Trail, its importance no longer local lore but part of the country's official heritage.
If you visit
Paige is small and quiet, set in the rolling farm and timber country of Bastrop County near the famous Lost Pines. This is a place to slow down. The marker will not overwhelm you — it invites you to imagine instead.
Stand beside it and picture the road at its height: an oxcart groaning under supplies, a lone rider, a family of settlers moving north. The path they followed threads right through this unassuming landscape, and the modern lanes here trace much the same ground.
Work it into a leisurely central Texas drive. Pair the stop with a wander through the Lost Pines country nearby, and let the contrast sink in — tall pines where you'd expect prairie, and a three-hundred-year-old royal road hiding in plain sight along a rural Texas byway.
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
Giddings, TX
This marker commemorates the King's Highway, or El Camino Real de los Tejas—the Spanish royal road later known as the Old San Antonio Road—that linked colonial mission and settlement across Texas. The Daughters of the American Revolution, working with the State of Texas, marked its course with a series of granite monuments in 1918. The historic route was among the earliest overland thoroughfares connecting the region's far-flung communities.
King's Highway - Camino Real - Old San Antonio Road
Lincoln, TX
This marker commemorates the King's Highway, or Camino Real, the Spanish colonial road system that once linked the missions and settlements of Texas and stretched toward Mexico and Louisiana. Placed in 1918 by the Daughters of the American Revolution and the State of Texas, it was part of an early-20th-century effort to trace and memorialize the historic route. The road carried soldiers, missionaries, traders, and settlers for well over a century.
Rock Front Saloon, 1870
McDade, TX
The Rock Front Saloon opened in 1870 in the rough railroad town of McDade, serving as a stagecoach stand, U.S. post office, and general business house. Like many frontier gathering places, it also witnessed violence, the scene of a revenge gunfight in 1883. Its survival earned it recognition as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1963.
McDade
McDade, TX
Laid out in 1871 and named for Brenham lawyer James McDade, this Bastrop County town grew into a busy freight center and stagecoach stop, its school-church raised the following year. But prosperity came with lawlessness: a vigilante group organized in 1883 hanged three men on Christmas Eve, and the next day's reckoning erupted in a gunfight at the Rock Saloon, a building that survives today as a museum.