King's Highway - Camino Real - Old San Antonio Road
Lincoln, Lee 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, placed by the Daughters of the American Revolution and the State of Texas in 1918, honors the old Camino Real — the King's Highway — that Spanish authorities blazed across Texas to link their missions and presidios with settlements to the south. Following older Indian trails, the route carried missionaries, soldiers, and later Anglo colonists through the region for well over a century. It remained one of the great arteries of early Texas travel and settlement.
Why it matters
The Camino Real is the oldest highway in Texas, the Spanish colonial road along which missions, empresarios, and eventually American settlers opened the region to European settlement.
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Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Old Dime Box
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The county's second-oldest community, Dime Box lay within Stephen F. Austin's "Old Three Hundred" colony and began as Browne's Mills. Its curious name came from the practice of leaving dimes in a box at Joseph S. Browne's mill so the postman could fetch goods from Giddings for local families.
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.
Site of Camino Real
Caldwell, TX
The Camino Real, or Old San Antonio Road, was the great artery of early Texas, tracing ancient Indian and buffalo trails and echoing the 1691 route of Spanish padres. Stretching roughly a thousand miles from Saltillo in Mexico into Louisiana, it carried explorers, traders, soldiers, and settlers for generations before it was surveyed around 1800 as the "King's Highway." Here it also marked the boundary between the early colonies of Stephen F. Austin and Sterling C. Robertson.
An Arm of The Chisholm Cattle Trail
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After the Civil War, the Chisholm Trail carried Texas longhorns north to the Kansas railheads and eastern markets, and a branch of that famous route swung from Matagorda County up through Burleson County toward the main trail near present McGregor. Stores like James L. Dean's — later the town of Deanville — and the White Inn sprang up to serve the drovers, turning the cattle path into a commercial road. When rail lines reached the area in the late 1870s, the long drives faded.