Camp Ranch Community

Camp Ranch was a German settlement made from a cattle ranch. In 1874 John F. Camp bought a league, 4,428 acres, from Joseph Dwyer, and 1,181 more acres the next year. The 1904 buyers, S. V. Houston, H. S. Tom and William Green, sold farms to families, mostly of German descent, from DeWitt, Lavaca, Columbus, Guadalupe and Gonzales counties. Green gave the land for a one-room school, and in 1906 William Striebeck sold the cemetery trustees an acre for $25. A dance platform became a hall in 1911 and closed after a fatal stabbing.

What the plaque says

Camp Ranch Community This area located west of Floresville was one of the largest ranches in the cattle-driving era. During the 1700s and 1800s, the area, being prime cattle ranch land, dominated the pre-Wilson County economy and served as a gathering point of small herds creating larger herds to trail up north. In 1731, the meadowland west of the San Antonio River was owned by Mission Espada with the ranch headquarters being the compound of Rancho de Las Cabras. In 1874, John F. Camp purchased and began developing the prairie ranch land. By 1904, Camp's ranch, having increased size to approximately 10,000 acres, was sold to S.V. Houston, H.S. Tom and William Green. The new owners were land developers and began dividing the ranch into smaller acreage tracts to settlers from surrounding counties. Then the small, prosperous Camp Ranch community, named after John F. Camp, began to develop as twenty families moved to the area. To encourage additional development, the new landowners built a one-room school house known as Green School. Later, a larger school was built named Camp Ranch School. Other additions were the Evergreen Cemetery, dance platform, Evergreen Shooting Club and baseball field. Around 1912, resident Charley Boening added a filling station, garage, general repair shop and grocery store. Although many of these tangible reminders of the town have been lost to time, the Evergreen Cemetery remains as a connection to the Camp Ranch community heritage. (2017)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Longhorn Museum — 18 mi
  Atascosa County in one roadside museum: longhorn-and-mustang ranching, a moved railroad depot and caboose, a horse-drawn hearse and the town that calls itself the birthplace of the cowboy.
• Panna Maria — 20 mi
  The Silesian village on a plateau above the San Antonio River that claims the oldest permanent Polish settlement in America, with a church of 1878 and a ceiling found again in 2000.
• Mission Espada and the Espada Aqueduct — 22 mi
  The southernmost San Antonio mission and the oldest Spanish aqueduct in the United States, still carrying river water over Sixmile Creek to the fields after nearly three centuries.
• Mission San Juan — 23 mi
  The mission near the river bend where the San Antonio got its name in 1691, with an unfinished church foundation and farm fields still watered by an eighteenth-century acequia.

More markers nearby

• Mision de las Cabras ("Mission of the Goats") — 2.3 mi
• Near Site of Lodi Ferry — 4.2 mi
• Site of Old Town: Lodi — 4.2 mi
• Rancho de Pataguilla — 4.2 mi