Site of Creed Taylor Ranch Home

🏛️The era

Creed Taylor's life stretches across the most turbulent decades of Texas history. Born in 1819, he came of age as Texas moved from a Mexican province to open revolution in 1835. The first shots were fired at Gonzales that October, and within weeks Texan volunteers were fighting near San Antonio, at Concepción and then in the Siege of Bexar, which drove Mexican forces from the town by December.

Independence did not bring peace to the frontier. Through the years of the Republic, settlers pushing west clashed repeatedly with the Comanche and other Native nations whose homelands they were entering, and Mexico had not given up its claim to Texas. The Texas Rangers, small mounted companies of volunteers, became the Republic's main defense on this contested edge.

By the time Taylor built his stone house in 1869 to 1871, Texas had been through annexation, a war with Mexico, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. The Hill Country west of San Antonio, including this part of Kimble County, was still thinly settled ranch country, and a substantial two-story stone home out here was a real statement of permanence.

👥People & events

Taylor was only a teenager when he fought at Gonzales in 1835, the skirmish that opened the Texas Revolution. He went on to fight at the Battle of Concepción and in the Siege of Bexar, taking part in the early campaign that won San Antonio for the Texan side.

In 1840 he joined the Texas Rangers and fought at Plum Creek, where Texans met a large Comanche force returning from a major raid toward the coast that summer. The following year he signed on with the Rangers again, this time under Capt. Jack Hays, one of the most famous Ranger leaders of the era. With Hays he fought in the Bandera Pass Indian fight, a clash whose exact date and details historians still debate, and at the Battle of Salado, when Texans turned back a Mexican invasion force near San Antonio in 1842. He also served in the Mexican War of 1846.

After all those campaigns, Taylor settled into ranching and, between 1869 and 1871, built a two-story house of native stone here. It was considered the finest home west of San Antonio. The house burned in 1926; Dillard Stapp rebuilt it, and it burned down again in 1956. Taylor himself died in 1906, having lived long enough to see the frontier he fought over become settled country.

The Taylor name is also tied to one of Texas's most notorious post-Civil War feuds, the Sutton-Taylor feud in the counties southeast of San Antonio. Accounts of that violent episode are tangled and contested, so it is best read about in careful histories rather than folklore.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

Taylor's résumé reads almost like a table of contents for the making of Texas: revolution, Ranger campaigns against Comanche raiders and Mexican invaders, and the war that followed annexation. Few single lives connect so many of the events that brought Texas, and ultimately the whole Southwest, into the United States.

That story has two sides. For Anglo settlers like Taylor, the Rangers were protectors on a dangerous frontier. For the Comanche and other Native peoples, those same campaigns were part of a long struggle to keep their lands, one they would eventually lose. Plum Creek and fights like it are key moments in that larger story of American expansion and its costs.

The stone house matters too. It shows the arc of a frontier generation, from young volunteers with rifles to established ranchers building homes meant to last. That it burned twice, and now survives only as a site, is a reminder of how fragile even the grandest frontier buildings could be.

🧭If you visit

The site is near Segovia in Kimble County, deep in the Texas Hill Country, not far from Interstate 10 between San Antonio and the West Texas plains. This is rugged, beautiful ranch land of limestone hills, clear rivers, and live oaks, and it helps explain why a house of native stone would be the natural choice here.

The house itself is gone, so come to this marker for the story rather than a building. Stand here and imagine a two-story stone home rising out of this country in the years just after the Civil War, when it would have been a rare sight so far west of San Antonio.

The marker fits naturally into a Hill Country drive, and Taylor's story invites a longer trip of your own: east to Gonzales, where the revolution began, and to San Antonio, where Concepción, Bexar, and Salado Creek all played out. Following his footsteps is a way to see much of Texas history on a single route.