Site of Idlewild Community
Macdona, Bexar County, Texas
Marker Inscription
This farming community was a growing settlement in July of 1867 when a group of Indians on horseback attacked Romanus Gross, age 51, and his 19-year-old son George on land belonging to the elder Gross' son-in-law, Michael Kauffmann. A party of men from Castroville was in pursuit of the Indians, who had been accused of stealing horses. Both Grosses were shot in the side; George was scalped. The community was formally organized in about 1879, the same year that Thomas Dunkin, a lawyer, arrived from New York. Dunkin lived and worked as a tutor in the home of Michael Kauffmann and his family. Seeing the growth of the community, Dunkin and Kauffmann convinced their neighbors of the need for a schoolhouse. Kauffmann provided the land and Dunkin became their first teacher. He taught an innovative curriculum designed in New York for one-room schools. Dunkin welcomed the railroad in 1881 by offering twenty acres of his own land for a station and townsite, but other necessary land could not be secured and the station was erected on a site that became Lacoste. Competition between the communities was high, and Idlewild remained an agricultural and livestock center. In 1887, Dunkin applied for a U. S. postal permit. He first chose the name Ida, for Michael Kauffmann's daughter, and then tried Ivanhoe, but both names were rejected by the postal service because they were already in use in other Texas locations. He finally named the community Idlewild after Idlewild, New York. The post office remained in service until 1902. Idlewild's second school closed in 1955. (1999)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Idlewild grew from a scattered farming settlement — where a violent 1867 raid left two members of the Gross family shot and one scalped — into an organized community by 1879. A New York lawyer named Thomas Dunkin tutored, taught the district's first school, and named the town after Idlewild, New York, after the postal service rejected his earlier choices. When the railroad bypassed it for nearby Lacoste, Idlewild's fortunes faded; its post office closed in 1902 and its last school in 1955.
Why it matters
Idlewild's rise and quiet disappearance trace the boom-and-bust logic of the Texas frontier, where a railroad's route could decide which towns lived and which vanished.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the decades after the Civil War, the rolling farmland southwest of San Antonio was still very much a frontier. Bexar County had long been shaped by waves of settlers — Spanish and Mexican, then German and Alsatian families who had come to nearby Castroville in the 1840s — and by the 1860s and 1870s newcomers were pushing out onto scattered farms and ranches in search of good soil and open range.
This was the Reconstruction and Gilded Age era, a time when the map of Texas was being redrawn almost yearly. Small farming settlements sprang up wherever a few families gathered, and their futures hinged on things they could not control: rainfall, cattle prices, and — above all — where the railroads chose to lay their track.
It was also a violent and unsettled country. Raids and reprisals were a real danger on the western edge of settlement, and a farm family working its fields lived with a level of risk that is hard to imagine from a quiet roadside today. Into that landscape came the little community that would eventually call itself Idlewild.
People & events
The community's story opens with tragedy. In the summer of 1867, before the settlement even had a name, an older farmer named Romanus Gross and his teenage son George were attacked on land belonging to Gross's son-in-law, Michael Kauffmann. Both were badly wounded, and the younger man was scalped — a brutal reminder of how exposed these frontier farms were. Men from nearby Castroville had been pursuing the raiders, who were accused of horse theft, but they arrived too late to prevent the violence.
More than a decade later, the settlement found its shape through an unlikely pairing. Around 1879 a New York lawyer named Thomas Dunkin arrived and took up residence in Michael Kauffmann's household, working as a tutor. Dunkin saw the community growing and, together with Kauffmann, convinced their neighbors that they needed a proper schoolhouse. Kauffmann gave the land; Dunkin became the first teacher, bringing with him an innovative curriculum designed back East for one-room schools.
Dunkin's fingerprints are all over the town's early life, right down to its name. When he applied for a post office in 1887, his first two choices were rejected because other Texas towns had already claimed them — including the name Ida, chosen in honor of Kauffmann's daughter. He finally settled on Idlewild, borrowing it from a place he had known in New York, and carrying a piece of his old home into his new one.
Its place in the American story
Idlewild is a small but perfect example of a pattern that played out thousands of times across America in the late nineteenth century: the making — and unmaking — of a town by the railroad. When the railroad came through in 1881, Dunkin offered twenty acres of his own land for a station and townsite. But the rest of the needed land couldn't be secured, and the depot went up elsewhere, at what became the town of Lacoste. In that single decision, one community's future was quietly handed to its neighbor.
What followed was the familiar arithmetic of the frontier economy. The town with the depot drew the commerce, the travelers, and the growth, while Idlewild remained what it had always been — an agricultural and livestock center, competing hard but slowly losing ground. Its post office closed in 1902, and its last school shut its doors in 1955.
The rise and fade of Idlewild traces the boom-and-bust logic that built and emptied the American map. For every town that swelled into a city because the tracks ran through it, others like Idlewild slipped toward the status of a ghost town — not through disaster, but simply through being bypassed.
If you visit
Today Idlewild is a place you have to look for with imagination as much as with your eyes. There's no bustling main street to walk; instead there is open Texas farmland, big sky, and the quiet that settles over places where a community once was and no longer quite is.
Stand near the marker and think about the geography that decided everything here. The town of Lacoste, which won the railroad depot, is just a short drive away — a living illustration of how a few miles once separated the towns that thrived from the ones that faded. Picture Dunkin's one-room school and the farms that spread out around it, and the family that worked this land through both hardship and hope.
It makes a rewarding stop on a back-roads drive through Bexar and Medina County history. Come for the marker, but stay a moment for the feeling of the place: this is what much of rural America looks like once the boom has passed, where the story is written in the fields and the silence rather than in surviving buildings.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Thomas Dunkin
- · Michael Kauffmann
Themes & tags
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