Site of Idlewild Community

Dunkin's school became known as Delta School, a one-teacher elementary school. The post office he obtained operated from 1887 to 1902 and briefly again in 1908. Idlewilde, as the Handbook spells it, lay on the Medina River off U.S. Highway 90. The railroad towns around it fared better: Macdona, named for Englishman George Macdona, sold its first lots in 1886, and LaCoste, first called Fernando, took its name in 1898. By the 1930s Idlewilde had a flag station, a school and a few houses, and by the 1950s it was gone from the maps.

What the plaque says

Site of Idlewild Community This farming community was a growing settlement in July of 1867 when a group of Indians on horseback attacked Romanus Gross, age 51, and his 19-year-old son George on land belonging to the elder Gross' son-in-law, Michael Kauffmann. A party of men from Castroville was in pursuit of the Indians, who had been accused of stealing horses. Both Grosses were shot in the side; George was scalped. The community was formally organized in about 1879, the same year that Thomas Dunkin, a lawyer, arrived from New York. Dunkin lived and worked as a tutor in the home of Michael Kauffmann and his family. Seeing the growth of the community, Dunkin and Kauffmann convinced their neighbors of the need for a schoolhouse. Kauffmann provided the land and Dunkin became their first teacher. He taught an innovative curriculum designed in New York for one-room schools. Dunkin welcomed the railroad in 1881 by offering twenty acres of his own land for a station and townsite, but other necessary land could not be secured and the station was erected on a site that became Lacoste. Competition between the communities was high, and Idlewild remained an agricultural and livestock center. In 1887, Dunkin applied for a U. S. postal permit. He first chose the name Ida, for Michael Kauffmann's daughter, and then tried Ivanhoe, but both names were rejected by the postal service because they were already in use in other Texas locations. He finally named the community Idlewild after Idlewild, New York. The post office remained in service until 1902. Idlewild's second school closed in 1955. (1999)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Landmark Inn State Historic Site — 5.9 mi
  A store and stage stop at the Medina River ford in Henri Castro's Alsatian town, with a mill race under the ground and rooms you can still rent for the night.
• Mission Concepción — 19 mi
  A stone church dedicated in 1755 that has never fallen into ruin, its convento ceilings still painted, and the ground where the Texas Revolution's fight for San Antonio began.
• San Antonio Missions National Historical Park — 19 mi
  Four working parish churches on the Mission Trail south of downtown, with the visitor center at Mission San Jose, the Queen of the Missions, and the descendants who still worship there.
• King William Historic District — 19 mi
  Mission farmland turned German merchants' quarter on the San Antonio River, renamed in World War I, then saved by a neighbor who restored fourteen houses, starting with his own.

More markers nearby

• Our Lady of Grace Catholic Church — 1.6 mi
• City Hotel — 1.7 mi
• Hendrick Arnold — 4.4 mi
• Henri Castro — 5.9 mi