The Hon. Samuel Boyd Patton

Kendalia, TX

Born in South Carolina in 1787, Samuel Boyd Patton served in the War of 1812 and held office in the Alabama legislature before moving to Texas in 1837. There he sat on the Board of Land Commissioners and in the Congress of the Republic of Texas, helped organize Blanco County, and became its first chief justice. He later served as Kendall County's second chief justice and was buried on his homestead in 1869.

Spring Branch, TX

German Catholic families settled the Honey Creek area beginning in 1845, worshiping first in a home and a log chapel. In 1878 Johann Adam Kneupper and his wife Margarethe gave the land and helped neighbors raise this one-room chapel from locally quarried stone, where services were held until 1892.

Spring Branch, TX

German native Adam Becker came to Texas in 1845 to join Prince Carl of Solms-Braunfels and the Adelsverein colonization effort, helping build Fredericksburg before establishing his own homestead here by 1852. He raised cattle and built a house of locally quarried stone and hand-hewn cypress cut from the nearby Guadalupe River. Becker became a U.S. citizen in 1860 and, at his death in 1901, was buried in the cemetery on his own land.

Sisterdale, TX

Where the old Pinta Trail forded the Guadalupe River, the Hill Country frontier found one of its key landmarks. In October 1839 a Republic of Texas expedition of surveyors, Texas Rangers, and volunteers gathered near here, stacked a pile of rocks on the north bank to mark their starting point, and ran a fifty-mile survey line northeast through the wilderness. The ranger and surveyor Jack Hays returned to plot land grants around the crossing, a nearby creek took the name of a man killed on the expedition — giving Sisterdale its namesake — and by 1847 German immigrants bound for Fredericksburg were using the same ford, with Nicolaus Zink settling as the area's first resident.