McGehee Crossing

Thomas G. McGehee came to Texas by sea: in 1833 he and his brother John chartered a schooner, loaded it with Florida lumber and sold the cargo at a profit at the mouth of the Brazos. He settled at Bastrop early in 1835. When Santa Anna's army besieged the Alamo, McGehee commanded a unit of Billingsley's company on the Old San Antonio Road east of present New Braunfels, and as the cannon fire rolled across the prairie he sent a courier to warn Bastrop. His wife fled in the Runaway Scrape with a slave girl and an ox cart.

What the plaque says

McGehee Crossing The Camino Real, also known as the Old San Antonio Road and the King's Highway, followed a route from Nacogdoches to the Rio Grande. Louis Juchereau de St. Denis (1676-1744) traveled the route to establish trade between the French in Louisiana and the Spanish of Coahuila province on the Rio Grande in 1714. The first settlement at the San Marcos River crossing of the road was Villa San Marcos de Neve, established by the Spanish in 1808. It was abandoned by 1812 due to the brewing Mexican revolution. During their colonization efforts in 1820 and 1821, Moses Austin (1761-1821) and his son, Stephen F. Austin (1793-1836), very likely crossed the San Marcos River near this point. Thomas Gilmer McGehee (1810-1890) settled on the east side of the river on a Mexican land grant about 1846. In 1859 his nephew, Charles L. McGehee, Jr. (1837-1929), acquired 1200 acres of land bordered by the Camino Real and the river. Ten years later he sold the land to his cousin, George T. McGehee (1836-1926). Due to the McGehee family's association with this historic site, it became known as McGehee Crossing. (1987)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Spring Lake and the Meadows Center — 2.5 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.
• Lockhart Courthouse Square — 13 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.
• Gruene Historic District — 15 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 — 18 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.

More markers nearby

• Site of the First Town of San Marcos — 1.1 mi
• Don Felipe Roque de la Portilla — 1.1 mi
• San Marcos Springs — 2.5 mi
• William W. Moon — 2.6 mi