John Henry Saunders Homestead

Saunders went to war at thirteen, volunteering for the Second Virginia Cavalry in Fitzhugh Lee's division of the Army of Northern Virginia. After college in Nashville he taught two years in Indian Territory before coming to Texas in 1870. He and Calladonia Saunders raised thirteen children. In Wimberley he helped install the first water system, a hydraulic ram that pumped water 200 yards uphill from Cypress Creek to a large cypress-wood tank, and he was a partner in Saunders and Hughes, Photographers, with a studio in his general store.

What the plaque says

John Henry Saunders Homestead Born in Virginia, John Henry Saunders (1850-1919) served in the Confederate Cavalry and came to Texas in 1870, via Tennessee and Indian Territory. He was the first teacher at Purgatory Springs (later called Hugo) where he married Calladonia Modeline Williamson (1855-1930) in 1872. He built a store west of this house, and served twice as Wimberley postmaster between 1890 and 1907; as county commissioner; and as the first county school superintendent from 1907 to 1916. the Saunders lived in this c. 1870 house from 1888 to 1907, then moved to San Marcos. The house exhibits c. 1930 alterations. Texas Sesquicentennial 1836 - 1986

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Spring Lake and the Meadows Center — 12 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.
• Gruene Historic District — 18 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.
• Sophienburg Museum and Archives — 21 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.
• Pedernales Falls State Park — 23 mi
  The Pedernales stepping down over layered limestone east of Johnson City, a river that can turn from a placid stream to a torrent in minutes.

More markers nearby

• Wimberley Mills — steps away
• The Century-Old Wimberley Cemetery — 0.3 mi
• Driftwood Cemetery — 9.5 mi
• Agricultural Society of Fischer — 9.9 mi