Joe H. Newcomer

Medina, where Newcomer is buried, grew from a sawmill built in the area as early as 1865. Its post office opened in 1880, and by 1914 it had 400 people. The Depression cut that to 250 in the early 1930s, but by the late 1940s the town had recovered to 475, with four churches. For a century the land around it went mostly to livestock and hunting leases. Then in 1980 Baxter Adams Jr. planted an experimental orchard of dwarf apple trees, which bore their first fruit for sale in 1984; by 1990 some 300,000 trees grew around Medina.

What the plaque says

Joe H. Newcomer Special Texas Ranger, Deputy Sheriff, Justice of Peace, Bandera County. World War II shipboard security officer for chemical company. Also Uvalde alderman, county clerk, chief of police. Member Internationl Association of Chiefs of Police. President Texas Chapter, F.B.I. National Academy Associates. A founder and president Southwest Texas Peace Officers Association. Married first Mary Etta McCain; second, Avis W. Adcock. Recorded, 1968.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Frontier Times Museum — 12 mi
  A museum built of fossils, petrified wood and cave formations in Bandera, holding a printer-historian's collection of frontier relics and oddities.
• Schreiner Mansion — 18 mi
  The 1879 downtown home of Charles Schreiner, the Alsatian-born merchant, banker and rancher whose store and mohair trade built Kerrville.
• Lost Maples State Natural Area — 20 mi
  A canyon of the upper Sabinal where a relict stand of bigtooth maples turns color each autumn, a sight that drew crowds up a gravel road long before there was a park.
• Treue der Union Monument — 23 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.

More markers nearby

• Bandera Pass — 9.5 mi
• Clark Family Cemetery — 9.7 mi
• Site of Camp Verde — 9.8 mi
• Penateka Comanches — 11 mi