Bandera Historic Town Center

John Hunter Herndon, the partner the plaque calls one of the richest men in Texas, was born near Georgetown, Kentucky, in 1813 and studied arts and law at Transylvania College. He reached Galveston in January 1838, practiced law at Richmond and married Barbara Calvit, heir to the Calvit sugar plantation in Brazoria County. By 1860 he held $1,605,000 in real property and forty enslaved people, and he is believed to have owned a million acres of Texas land. The Civil War and Reconstruction destroyed most of that fortune, and he died at Boerne in 1878.

What the plaque says

Bandera Historic Town Center The origin of the name of Bandera Pass and its namesake city and county dates back to conflicts between the Spanish Army and native Lipan Apaches in the early 18th century. The history of the townsite began in the early 1840s, when Charles de Montel and John James explored and surveyed the area on the northeast side of the medina river. The men formed a company with John Hunter Herndon and purchased land from Bernardino Ruiz out of Bexar County land survey no. 58, section 5, on December 9, 1841. De Montel, a German immigrant, became a soldier in the Texas army and an early area settler; James surveyed across Texas including some of the earliest mapping of the Hill Country; and Herndon was one of the wealthiest men in Texas at the time. Together, these three men oversaw the establishment of buildings and expansion for the town of Bandera. Near what became the center of the townsite survey (now 11th street), Ruiz had built a small stone house, which was later used by James as a land office and then sold to de Montel. James and de Montel also established a sawmill in the new town. In 1854, Lyman Wight established a Mormon colony near Bandera, which included a schoolhouse and furniture factory. The following year, polish immigrants arrived, and many of their early hand-cut limestone buildings are among the city's architectural heritage. Polish immigrant Johann Dlugosz (John Dugosh) built the first combined store and post office for German immigrant, August Klappenbach. The Texas legislature created and organized Bandera County in 1856 and made Bandera the county seat. Settlers of various origins became part of the community, including African American, British, Norwegian, Scottish, Irish and French immigrants. (2015)

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 — 23 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

• Bandera, "Cowboy Capital of the World" — steps away
• Great Western Cattle Trail — steps away
• Camp Montel, C.S.A. — steps away
• Old Texas Ranger Trail — steps away