Medina County
Hondo, Medina County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Medina County, Formed from Bexar County. Created Februaru 12, 1848, organized August 7, 1848. Named for the river which traverses the county. County Seat, Castroville, 1848-1892, Hondo since. Primarily a farming and ranching area.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Carved from sprawling Bexar County in early 1848, Medina County took its name from the river winding through it and was organized that same summer, just as Texas settled into its first years of American statehood. Castroville served as the original county seat before Hondo claimed the honor in 1892. The land was, and remains, a country of farms and ranches.
Why it matters
Its creation marks the westward spread of organized government across Texas in the early years after annexation.
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Related events
- · Creation of Medina County, 1848
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Hondo
Hondo, TX
Spanish explorers named the deep gully 'El Arroyo Hondo' long before Henri Castro's colonists began settling the area in the 1840s. The town took shape after the Galveston, Harrisburg and San Antonio Railroad platted a townsite in 1881; a post office followed in 1882, and the county seat moved here from Castroville in 1892. Hondo grew as a cotton and trade center, struck oil in the 1920s, and exploded during World War II when an Army Air Corps base pushed its population toward 12,000 before the base closed in 1946.
D'Hanis
D'Hanis, TX
In 1847 empresario Henri Castro planted D'Hanis, his fourth colony, and named it for a company official. Alsatian immigrants endured great hardship to raise a community that lasted more than thirty years—until the railroad bypassed the town in 1881 and the settlement simply picked up and moved to the tracks. The new D'Hanis prospered by shipping cattle, cotton, and brick, and from 1900 a strong Mexican-American community added to its life.
Ihnken Family Cemetery
Castroville, TX
Early Castroville colonists—Dutch and German immigrants who arrived on Henri Castro's ships in the 1840s—rest in this small family plot, where Marie Becker Ihnken was buried in 1847. Her son Gerhard, a leading citizen, farmed vast lands and ran a sawmill, store, and orchard, and is credited with bringing the area's first reaper and binder. One of Medina County's oldest cemeteries, it holds eight marked Ihnken graves and, by tradition, a freedman who worked for the family; it has stayed inactive since 1950 to protect unmarked graves.
Haby Settlement
Rio Medina, TX
In the 1840s, families from Oberentzen in Alsace, France—the Habys, the Gsells, and the Becks—settled a high bluff above the Medina River, part of the wave of Alsatian colonists Henri Castro drew to this stretch of the Texas frontier. Two Haby sons helped found nearby Castroville in 1844, and the clan earned the nickname the 'fighting Habys' as several joined the Texas Rangers to defend the settlement. They harnessed the perennial artesian springs they called Die Quelle with gravity-fed irrigation ditches, and their stone Alsatian homes and family farms endure today.