The Guadalupe River

Espinosa, Ramón and Aguayo called the stream above the Comal the San Ybón and gave the name Guadalupe to the Comal itself; Pedro de Rivera used the modern name for the upper river by 1727. The Mexican government approved plans to make the river navigable, and the Republic and the state authorized improvements, but snags above Victoria defeated them. In 1935 the Corps of Engineers judged navigation uneconomical and proposed the Victoria Barge Canal instead, opened in the mid-1960s. The Guadalupe Waterpower Company, founded in 1912, built dams between New Braunfels and Seguin by 1920.

What the plaque says

The Guadalupe River One of the earliest explored rivers in Texas. Named for Our Lady of Guadalupe by Spaniard Alonso de Leon in 1689. During 1691-1693, Domingo Teran de Los Rios, Spanish Governor of Texas, maintained a colony on the Guadalupe. In early Anglo-American settlement, 30 or 40 families located along its bank, which formed a boundary of the Power-Hewetson Irish Colony. Near the mouth of the river, historic Victoria was founded, and 60 miles above was Gonzales, where the first shot for Texas freedom was fired, Oct. 2, 1835. The Guadalupe is 250 miles long. (1969)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sophienburg Museum and Archives — 14 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.
• 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.
• Spring Lake and the Meadows Center — 24 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.
• Natural Bridge Caverns — 25 mi
  The largest known cavern in Texas, found in 1960 by four college cavers under a ranch family's land, entered beneath a 60-foot limestone bridge and still growing.

More markers nearby

• Saffold Dam — steps away
• Claiborne West — 0.8 mi
• Riverside Cemetery — 0.9 mi
• Second Baptist Church of Seguin — 0.9 mi