Sabinal

The town began as Hammer's Station, a stage stop on the east bank of the Sabinal River, with a post office from October 19, 1854. Early neighbors included Peter Rheiner, later father-in-law of John Nance Garner. A soldier named Austerman, passing in the late 1850s, remembered a community hungry for news and long trains of freight wagons hauling supplies to the western frontier. Thomas Hammer himself was killed by bandits in 1857. Louis M. Peters opened a general store in 1874, and Angora goats imported from Turkey reached the Sabinal area in 1881.

What the plaque says

Sabinal Named by Spanish for Rio Sabina and Cypress trees along river. Town founded in 1854 by Thomas B. Hammer who operated a stage shop and was first postmaster. Despite Indian depredations, town thrived as settlers built homes, and a railroad reached here in 1881. In 1906, town was incorporated. Telephone service started. City water works and volunteer fire department organized. In 1907, Sabinal Christian College was founded. Closed in 1917. Cotton industry was foremost in early 1900's. Today, farming and ranching flourishing in community. (1967)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fort Inge Historical Site — 21 mi
  A county park on the Leona River below a 140-foot volcanic plug, where an army post guarded the new road to El Paso from 1849 to 1869 and Texas Rangers camped after.
• Uvalde Grand Opera House — 21 mi
  An 1891 Victorian opera house on the Uvalde square with a turret and a dragon weathervane, once owned by John Nance Garner and still staging volunteer theater upstairs.
• Briscoe-Garner Museum — 21 mi
  The Uvalde house of John Nance Garner, the vice president who made the office a power in Congress, now a free museum to him and to Governor Dolph Briscoe.
• Garner State Park — 26 mi
  The Frio River park that Uvalde County built with the Civilian Conservation Corps and named for its own vice president, where people have danced on the stone pavilion every summer since the 1940s.

More markers nearby

• John M. Davenport — steps away
• Sabinal Methodist Church — 0.5 mi
• First Baptist Church, Sabinal — 0.6 mi
• Site of Camp Sabinal — 1.4 mi