W. G. Hughes

Hastings lay on the Bandera stage line. Its post office opened in 1890, and by 1892 the community had fifty people, raising stock or running dairies. It fell to thirty by 1896, and the post office closed in 1903. The Hastings school had one teacher and fourteen students in 1905 and was probably consolidated in 1907, when the Boerne Independent School District was formed. By the 1940s maps showed no trace of it. The English settlers it drew were part of a wider wave: immigrants arrived in the county from England in the 1880s and 1890s.

What the plaque says

W. G. Hughes The community of Hastings was established in the late 19th century with the settlement of immigrants from England coming to farm and ranch in Texas. William George (Willy) Hughes moved from Kensington, London, to Texas in 1878 at age 19 to learn about the business of managing and marketing sheep and wool. Willy took Oxfordshire Downs Sheep from England and began to build his herds on 160 acres southwest of Boerne. His two brothers, Harry and Gerard, joined him in 1879. That same year Willy bought his second piece of land where the ranch headquarters would be built. The Hughes Ranch bred cattle, sheep, goats and horses. The ranch expanded its operations to include U.S. Mail delivery, stage line services and meals, tourism activities, and buying and selling real estate. Willy moved from sheep wool production to angora goat mohair production by 1887 and was considered an authority on angora goats. The ranch headquarters was built in 1888 and still stands off Hwy. 46. Willy married Lucy Stephenson and she began to run her own operations on the ranch. She managed a dairy operation with 35 jersey cows and managed a resort business at the ranch headquarters called "Mineral Springs Ranche." Willy proposed a post office for the community, named Hastings Post Office after his father. It opened in 1890 in a room inside the Hughes Ranch House. That same year Willy started the Boerne and Bandera Stage Line Company which invited tourists from San Antonio and Boerne to visit the Hill Country in Bandera via the stage line. Willy provided land to Kendall County for the Hastings School and continued to support the community until his untimely death in 1902 from a train wreck in Belleville, Illinois. (2015)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Treue der Union Monument — 17 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.
• Frontier Times Museum — 19 mi
  A museum built of fossils, petrified wood and cave formations in Bandera, holding a printer-historian's collection of frontier relics and oddities.
• Old Tunnel State Park — 23 mi
  A railroad tunnel abandoned in 1942 that now shelters up to three million Mexican free-tailed bats, who fly out each evening from May through October.
• Natural Bridge Caverns — 26 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

• Camino Real de San Saba (Camino Viejo) in Kendall County — 2.3 mi
• Adolph (Ad) Toepperwein — 2.7 mi
• Staffel Family and the Staffel Store — 2.8 mi
• German Music in Boerne — 2.8 mi