Camino Real de San Saba (Camino Viejo) in Kendall County

The old road came down to Cibolo Creek, which rises ten miles northwest of Boerne and runs southeast 100 miles, marking the Bexar-Comal and Bexar-Guadalupe lines, to the San Antonio River near Karnes City. The creek has carried many names: Coahuiltecan people called it Xoloton and Tonkawan speakers Bata Coniquiyoqui. Father Damian Massanet called it Santa Crecencia in 1691, Domingo Teran de los Rios San Ygnacio de Loyola, and Domingo Ramon San Xavier in 1716; from Aguayo's expedition of 1721 it was the Arroyo or Rio Cibolo. Rubi listed it in 1768 among possible sites for posts.

What the plaque says

Camino Real de San Saba (Camino Viejo) in Kendall County Beginning in the 1700s, the Camino Real de San Saba extended northwest from San Antonio through the Comanche and Apache-dominated Hill Country to the Spanish fort on the San Saba River named Presidio San Luis de las Amarillas. A portion of the trail was drawn on a Spanish-era map of the San Antonio Presidio in 1767 by Joseph de Urrutia. The path also became known as Camino Viejo (Spanish for "Old Trail") in later documents. The San Saba Presidio officially closed in 1772. Camino Real de San Saba and the Pinta Trail were two useful pathways into the Hill Country for Spanish Entradas, early explorers and later settlers. Early surveyors, including John "Jack" Coffee Hays and John James contributed to the documentation and preservation of the historic road's alignment through their field notes and maps in Kendall County. The Pinta Trail a few miles to the east initially overshadowed the Camino San Saba in popularity, but both were used by German settlers from the 1840s onward. Alwin Sorgel recorded in 1847 that "there were two roads from San Antonio into the grant, the Camino Viejo going in a westerly direction and the Pindas Trail going in a northerly direction. The Indians used these trails for centuries." German cartographer Hermann Willke drew an 1850 map depicting both trails. Camino real San Saba came down this hill and passed a half-mile west of Boerne's Main Plaza, platted in 1852 by partners Gustav Theisen and John James. From there the pathway threaded a pre-Boerne settlement and further north, after going through Spanish Pass, crossed the Guadalupe River where Brownsboro sprang up. (2020)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Treue der Union Monument — 16 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.
• Frontier Times Museum — 20 mi
  A museum built of fossils, petrified wood and cave formations in Bandera, holding a printer-historian's collection of frontier relics and oddities.
• Old Tunnel State Park — 22 mi
  A railroad tunnel abandoned in 1942 that now shelters up to three million Mexican free-tailed bats, who fly out each evening from May through October.
• Natural Bridge Caverns — 24 mi
  The largest known cavern in Texas, found in 1960 by four college cavers under a ranch family's land, entered beneath a 60-foot limestone bridge and still growing.

More markers nearby

• Adolph (Ad) Toepperwein — 0.5 mi
• Staffel Family and the Staffel Store — 0.5 mi
• German Music in Boerne — 0.5 mi
• Homesite of Albert Paul Kutzer — 0.6 mi