Bandera County

After the trail drives faded, sheep and goats remade the county. Sheep were easier to keep on the sparse vegetation, and by 1880 they outnumbered cattle 32,974 to 9,471; that year the county shipped 296,578 pounds of wool, its chief export. Angora goats followed, and by 1910 there were 73,853 of them, nearly twice the sheep and almost five times the cattle. In 1930 ranchers shipped 470,311 pounds of mohair and 588,943 of wool. The railroads had bypassed the hilly county, so everything went overland to San Antonio. The population peaked at 5,332 in 1900.

What the plaque says

Bandera County A strategic Indian point in early days. Rangers and Comanches struggled here in 1843. In 1854 Elder Lyman Wight settled Mormon colony. In 1855 Poles settled here. From early days a part of Bexar County, created and organized in 1856. Bandera, the county seat founded by John James, Charles de Montel and John Herndon in 1853

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Frontier Times Museum — 0.3 mi
  A museum built of fossils, petrified wood and cave formations in Bandera, holding a printer-historian's collection of frontier relics and oddities.
• Treue der Union Monument — 19 mi
  An 1866 German-language monument in Comfort over the graves of Hill Country Unionists killed at the Nueces in 1862, its flag of thirty-six stars kept at half-staff.
• Schreiner Mansion — 22 mi
  The 1879 downtown home of Charles Schreiner, the Alsatian-born merchant, banker and rancher whose store and mohair trade built Kerrville.

More markers nearby

• Frontier Times Museum — 0.3 mi
• The Mills of Bandera — 0.4 mi
• Warren Hunter — 0.4 mi
• Camp Montel, C.S.A. — 0.5 mi