History of our Area

During late September, 2018, we visited with a neighbor, a rancher, who has lived in this general area all his life and in Hays County, his present location,  since 1946. We contacted him from a clue that he is one of  the oldest of our neighbors here in Southeastern Hays County.
On the phone, he said, sure come on over, I am here all the time.  So, we visited, armed with a list of topics of at least 20 items that were of interest.
Here are a few one liners which we found interesting:

• He attended a one room school in the area.  The school was on Purgatory Road, and still stands.  Later we drove the short distance to the site and spotted a building through the brush that borders the road and took this picture.  Later, we sent the picture to the historian and he said it looked like it was the old school but could not be sure.  Here is the photo: 
  
• There is a cave on the Summer Mountain Ranch subdivision near the old windmill on the south end.  The cave is small, not so large that one can stand upright.  At one time, the skull of a black bear was found in the cave.
• Cedars, or Ashe Junipers as they are, were no more or less numerous in the past than now.  Yes, they are invasive, but ranchers clear them out when necessary.  In the old days, ranchers and commercial cedar cutters cut the larger ones for use as fence posts, but the steel fence posts more or less ended that use.
• The mystery of the stone driveway gate just to the west of Cascade Trail, yet on Hugo Road, was to be the entrance gate to a property on the south side of Hugo Road.  This rancher told the owner that it would wash away in the next flood, but the owner built the gate anyway.   During the next flood of Purgatory Creek, the gate was washed downstream into the brush and the stone gate posts stand in silent vigilance today.  The owner passed away and nothing more was done.  This was in the late 1900s.
• When the rancher was a youngster, he watched his aunt paint a picture of the outfall of the sluice of a cotton gin on the San Marcos River.  He has the painting today.  The gin building and part of the dam exists today.   It is the uppermost (there are two) gin on the river.
• The stone house (original ranch house or the ranch) was built by a family named Ruby.  They sold it to Heap, who sold it to the current owner.
• The rancher knew Otto Stoeppler but said that Otto had not lived on  Hugo Road for any  length of time, having moved there not too long ago.  That would explain Otto not being very familiar with the topics discussed with him before he passed away within the last few years.
• The rancher reports that the same wildlife existed for all of his time in the area, except bobcats seemed to be more prevalent than they are today.  That is except for Turkeys; they were almost non existent when he was young, but now quite plentiful.
• Wells for windmills had to be drilled to about 300 feet for water.  Probably just into the Edwards Aquifer.
• Purgatory Creek never flowed year around.
• Commonly, he rode his bike to the Arkansas Spring and to the Blue Hole for swimming.
• The rancher has no idea when the stone walls that border the pastures were built. He would guess at late 1800s.
• He has found lots of arrowheads.  Most of them came from an embankment of a creek leading into the Guadalupe River.   The site is now underwater with Canyon Lake.
• He confirms our observation of an old roadbed behind the gasoline station at the Y in the road at RR12 and RR32, a place commonly called the Junction.   He thought that the road from the Junction to Wimberley was built around 1900.  Our old maps suggest that there were two roads leading westward from San Marcos, one to Wimberley, the other to Fisher Store.  The road to Fisher Store is probably our RR 12 and it most likely used the roadbed that is now Hugo Road and it passed through a small settlement named Hugo at the northern end of Purgatory Road. Not certain of this, it needs to be researched.