Site of Hays County's First Public Building

People were here long before the cabin. Archeological finds show Paleo-Indian people near San Marcos Springs at least 8,000 years ago, and excavations in the county indicate that Tonkawa people farmed in the area around A.D. 1200. Spanish travelers followed: Teran de los Rios in 1691, the Espinosa-Olivares-Aguirre party in 1709, and St. Denis, attacked by Apaches at the river crossing in 1714. A mission was authorized here in 1729 and withdrawn. When the county was formed in 1848, Moon, Merriman and Sessom, former rangers, had it named for John Coffee Hays.

What the plaque says

Site of Hays County's First Public Building Early San Marcos settlers erected log house here in 1847. Of elm, cedar and cypress, and built for church and school, the cabin had a floor of dirt, later one of puncheons (split logs). It was used as courthouse after Hays County was created 1848. County and district courts met in the building until 1861. Presbyterian and Baptist churches were organized here. Nearby was a stagecoach stop. Confederate Army recruits were trained in the area, using this house as headquarters. Structure burned in 1874, after falling into disuse by public. (1967)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Spring Lake and the Meadows Center — 0.7 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 — 14 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.
• Lockhart Courthouse Square — 16 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.
• Sophienburg Museum and Archives — 17 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

• William W. Moon — steps away
• The Courthouses of Hays County — 0.2 mi
• Founding of the First Methodist Church — 0.3 mi
• San Marcos Mill Tract — 0.4 mi