Winters-Wimberley House

The house survives because the community bought it. Wimberley Senior Citizens Activities, Inc. acquired the property with help from the Meadows Foundation, the Houston Endowment and the Burdine Johnson Foundation, and the Wimberley Institute of Cultures leases it as a cultural and educational center. The National Register listed it on May 22, 2002, as a hall-parlor house on 5.1 acres, a site now split by Ranch Road 12, which grew from the wagon path between the mill and the house. Winters's furniture is said to have furnished the 1859 Capitol.

What the plaque says

Winters-Wimberley House William Carvin Winters (1809-1864) and his wife Lavinia Winters (1805-1891) came to Texas from Tennessee in 1834, along with other members of his family. William and his brothers, James Washington and John Frelan, fought in the Battle of San Jacinto, where William was severely wounded. William became a noted woodcarver and furniture craftsman in Walker County and in Seguin. The Winters family eventually settled in Hays County. William and Lavinia arrived between 1853 and 1855 and he built a mill on Cypress Creek in 1856. The mill became the economic hub of the village, which took on the name Winters' Mill. William built a homestead on this site in 1857-1858. From here he could survey his sawmill and gristmill with its power source, Cypress Creek. One of the first stone houses in the area, the Winters house boasted 18-inch thick limestone walls. After William's death, his daughter Nancy and her husband John Cude took over the mill and the village became known as Cude's Mill. They sold the mill and family home to Pleasant and Amanda Wimberley in 1874. With their son Zachary, the Wimberleys expanded their business to include the production of flour and sorghum molasses as well as a cotton gin. The village name soon changed to Wimberleyville, later Wimberley. Zachary Wimberley's son-in-law, John Will Pyland, lived in the homestead and kept the mill in business until 1925. The evolution of the house, with its various alterations and additions, reflects the changing needs of the families who occupied it. A village landmark for generations, the Winters-Wimberley house remained with Wimberley family descendants until the 1990s. (1999)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Spring Lake and the Meadows Center — 12 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 — 18 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.
• Sophienburg Museum and Archives — 21 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.
• Pedernales Falls State Park — 23 mi
  The Pedernales stepping down over layered limestone east of Johnson City, a river that can turn from a placid stream to a torrent in minutes.

More markers nearby

• Wimberley Mills — steps away
• John Henry Saunders Homestead — steps away
• Site of Sidney J. Pyland Blacksmith Shop — steps away
• The Century-Old Wimberley Cemetery — 0.5 mi