Comal County

The river that named the county is said to be the shortest in the United States. It rises in a cluster of large springs in New Braunfels and runs about three miles southeast to the Guadalupe. Early Spanish explorers, among them Domingo Ramón and the Marqués de San Miguel de Aguayo, called it the Guadalupe; only after Pedro de Rivera gave that name to the longer stream in 1727 did the shorter one become the Comal. Its steady flow powered the town's grist, saw, flour and textile mills, and after 1900 much of its bank became parkland.

What the plaque says

Comal County Formed from Travis and Bexar land districts. Created - March 24,1846; Organized - July-13, 1846; Named for the river, so called from the pancake shape of the islands formed by its springs. New Braunfels, county seat established March 21,1845. Named in honor of the founder Prince Carl of Solms-Braunfels.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sophienburg Museum and Archives — 1.8 mi
  The hilltop where Prince Carl of Solms-Braunfels raised the Adelsverein's headquarters in 1845, now the museum and archive of the German colony that became New Braunfels.
• Gruene Historic District — 2.4 mi
  A cotton town on the Guadalupe that the boll weevil emptied, rescued in the 1970s by a kayaking architecture student, with a dance hall that says it has never closed.
• Natural Bridge Caverns — 15 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.
• Spring Lake and the Meadows Center — 16 mi
  The headsprings of the San Marcos River, among the longest-inhabited places in North America, once an amusement park with a swimming pig and now seen from glass-bottom boats.

More markers nearby

• New Braunfels — steps away
• Near River Crossing Used by New Braunfels' First Settlers — 0.7 mi
• Ferdinand J. Lindheimer — 1.1 mi
• Texas Germans in the Civil War — 1.3 mi