The Mills of Bandera

The river that powered the mills rises in north and west prongs fed by springs in northwest Bandera County, which meet near Medina; from there it runs 116 miles to the San Antonio River in south Bexar County. Alonso De Leon, crossing it in 1689, wrote that he named it for Pedro Medina, the Spanish engineer whose navigation tables he used with his astrolabe. Old maps also call it Rio Mariano, Rio San Jose or Rio de Bagres, the Catfish River, and for a time it was drawn as the boundary between Texas and Coahuila, running to the Gulf.

What the plaque says

The Mills of Bandera Communities in the 19th century relied on mills to provide lumber, shingles, flour and cloth. Local millers and blacksmiths were integral community members, providing the necessary materials for early development. Stephen F. Austin reported in 1833 that eight mills were operating in his Colony, and during the subsequent two decades, with substantially more settlers coming to Texas, demand for milled products increased dramatically. In 1852, A.M. Milstead, Thomas Odem and P.D. Saner camped on a hill above a supply of cypress in a hairpin curve of the Medina River west of Castroville. There, they chopped cypress shingles by hand. In June of that year, Charles DeMontel, a Castroville mill owner, entered an agreement with John James and John H. Herndon to establish a sawmill and shingle manufacturing operation at the site. DeMontel moved his horse-powered mill from Castroville to the new location, a migrant shingle camp that would grow to be the city of Bandera. In need of settlers and workers, the James, Montel & Company recruited a group of immigrants newly arrived to Texas from Upper Silesia, Poland in 1854. The recruits, consisting of sixteen families, helped construct a dam across the river and dig a millrace along the river from the initial mill at First Street to the site of later mills at Fourteenth Street. As the operation grew, DeMontel acquired land at auction for worker housing. The Bandera mills, which later included a flour mill, provided shingles for much of the region's construction, including U.S. Army installations at Fort Inge, Camp Wood, Camp Verde, Fort Lincoln and Fort Concho. Major flooding in April and August 1900 washed away the mills, and the first industry of Bandera became just a memory. (2006)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Frontier Times Museum — 0.2 mi
  A museum built of fossils, petrified wood and cave formations in Bandera, holding a printer-historian's collection of frontier relics and oddities.
• Treue der Union Monument — 19 mi
  An 1866 German-language monument in Comfort over the graves of Hill Country Unionists killed at the Nueces in 1862, its flag of thirty-six stars kept at half-staff.
• Schreiner Mansion — 23 mi
  The 1879 downtown home of Charles Schreiner, the Alsatian-born merchant, banker and rancher whose store and mohair trade built Kerrville.

More markers nearby

• Warren Hunter — steps away
• Bandera, "Cowboy Capital of the World" — 0.2 mi
• Bandera Historic Town Center — 0.2 mi
• Great Western Cattle Trail — 0.2 mi