Shiner Cemetery

Shiner, TX

William Green and his wife India came from Kentucky and built this house in 1853 in the classic Texas style, with a central 'dog trot' breezeway dividing two main rooms. Their son William Jr. and his wife Julia ran the Winnton post office and a general store here, which from 1869 to 1889 served as a social hub for the surrounding countryside. The property is now a Boy Scout camp.

Shiner, TX

Named for the crescent shape of its timber, Half Moon on Rocky Creek was a gathering place for Native peoples and travelers long before Spanish explorers noted it in 1689. Settlers arrived from the 1830s to trade and farm, and at its height in the mid-1880s the community boasted stores, a saloon, and a post office. When Henry B. Shiner donated land for a railroad in 1887, the rails bypassed Half Moon, and its people and commerce drained away into the new town of Shiner.

Shiner, TX

This marker remembers Sarah Howard, who came to Texas from Illinois with her first husband in 1828 and endured extraordinary hardship on the frontier. Over the following decade she lost husbands and family to frontier violence, survived captivity, and escaped to raise her surviving son, marrying four times before settling with Col. Phillip Howard in Gonzales in 1839. Her repeated survival became emblematic of the endurance demanded of pioneer women on the early Texas frontier.

Shiner, TX

George Herder, a veteran of the Texas Revolution turned pioneer farmer and rancher, built this Greek Revival home in the 1880s in the Half Moon community. His son William later ran a butcher shop, worked the land, and opened the house to weary travelers. Held by the family for more than a century, the house and its outbuildings are the last trace of Half Moon.