King's Highway - Camino Real - Old San Antonio Road

Spain tried the San Marcos country well before this road was marked. The San Xavier missions and the presidio of San Francisco Xavier stood briefly at the river's headwaters in 1755 before being moved within a year. Anglo-American settlement began in 1846, Cayton Erhard opened the first store and post office by 1847, and San Marcos already had 387 residents when the legislature made it the Hays County seat in 1848. Tarbox and Brown stagecoaches linked it with Austin and San Antonio that year, and it grew as the center of a cart trade with coastal commission merchants.

What the plaque says

King's Highway - Camino Real - Old San Antonio Road. Marked by the Daughters of the American Revolution and the State of Texas A.D. 1918

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Spring Lake and the Meadows Center — 6.0 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 — 9.7 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 — 12 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.
• Lockhart Courthouse Square — 18 mi
  A cotton-era courthouse town named the Barbecue Capital of Texas, built near the 1840 Plum Creek fight that followed the killing of Comanche leaders at peace talks.

More markers nearby

• Pitts Cemetery — 2.1 mi
• Stringtown — 2.2 mi
• First Baptist Church of San Marcos — 2.6 mi
• King's Highway - Camino Real - Old San Antonio Road — 3.1 mi