Salt Grass Trail Ride — Cat Spring Start RoadyGoat

1952

Cat Spring, in Austin County, is where the modern Salt Grass Trail Ride sets out — the 2004 ride, the 53rd annual, left Wittenburg's Pasture near Cat Spring on February 21, 2004. The Salt Grass is the oldest of the trail rides that herald the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo. It was first ridden in 1952, when Brenham mayor Reese Lockett, radio man Pat Flaherty, rancher E. H. Marks, and John Warnasch left Brenham on January 30th with the LH7 chuck wagon and followed the old pioneer trail to Houston. From a handful of riders that first year, it grew into dozens of wagons and hundreds of riders covering roughly 70 miles over seven days to the downtown Houston rodeo parade.

The Town That Walked to the Railroad RoadyGoat

1834

Cat Spring is older than the state it sits in. Germans out of Oldenburg and Westphalia settled here in 1834, two years before San Jacinto, led by Ludwig von Roeder and Robert Kleberg, pulled across the ocean by letters a man named Friedrich Ernst kept mailing home about the Mill Creek valley. And the name is not somebody's housecat. One of Leopold von Roeder's sons killed a puma at a spring feeding the San Bernard River, and the spring got named for the cat. By 1856 the farmers here had founded the first agricultural society in all of Texas, and by 1878 they had a post office. Then, in the early 1890s, the Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railroad came through and tied Cat Spring to New Ulm on the west and Sealy on the east, and this town did something towns almost never do. It did not wait for the railroad to reach Main Street. The town went to the railroad. The post office moved. The blacksmith moved. Most of the businesses in Cat Spring picked themselves up and resettled along the new line. That is why the street running beside those rails is called Front Street. It is named for what it faces. And the tracks are still live, still hauling freight for the Union Pacific, over the same alignment the maps still label Missouri-Kansas-Texas.

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Sixty-Seven Years of School, Then a Sign in the Grass RoadyGoat

1880

There is a metal sign standing in the grass in the middle of Cat Spring, and it is close to the only thing left that will tell you this town used to run its own school. Austin County Historic School Site, it says. This was the location of Cat Spring ISD, 1880 to 1947. Sixty-seven years. The county history backs up that start date: by 1880 Cat Spring had a gin, a saw mill, a grist mill, a planing mill, a hotel, a saddle shop, a shoe shop, a church, and a school. That was about as much town as this town ever got. And the Germans who founded the place had landed in 1834, two years before San Jacinto, so Cat Spring was already old when that school opened. Then the plaque stops at 1947, and here is the strange part. The district outlived the date on its own marker. Sealy's school history says Cat Spring and Sealy voted to consolidate on March 21st, 1953, and the county board approved it that April. Six years sit between the year on this plaque and the year the name came off the map, and nobody wrote down why. What the sign does tell you is who put it there. In 2004 the citizens of Austin County went out and did this on purpose, town after town, same plaque, same sentence, different dates. Wallis Independent, 1904 to 1929. Cat Spring ISD, 1880 to 1947. A county deciding that the schools it lost were still worth marking, even with nothing left standing to point at.

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San Felipe de Austin, TX

1824

San Felipe de Austin, on the west bank of the Brazos River at the Old San Antonio Road crossing, a site now on Interstate Highway 10 two miles east of Sealy in southeastern Austin County, was founded in 1824 by Stephen F. Austin as the unofficial capital of his colony. It became the first urban center in the Austin colony, which stretched northward from the Gulf of Mexico as far as the Old San Antonio Road and extended from the Lavaca River in the west to the San Jacinto River in the east. By October 1823, after briefly considering a location on the lower Colorado River, Austin, with the assistance of the Baron de Bastrop , decided to establish his capital on the Brazos near the settlement at which John McFarland operated a ferry. The site chosen was on a high, easily defensible bluff overlooking broad, fertile bottomlands. The location offered a number of advantages, including a central location and sources of fresh water independent of the Brazos. In late 1823 surveyor Seth Ingram began the tasks of defining the boundaries of the five-league expanse of prairie and woodland encompassed by the municipality and platting the town proper. The town's name was proposed by the governor of the Eastern Interior Provinces, Felipe de la Garza, to honor both the empresario , Austin, and the governor's own patron saint. Although planned on the basis of the prevailing Mexican town model with a regular grid of avenues and streets dominated by four large plazas, the settlement soon began to sprawl westward from the Brazos for more than a half mile along both sides of the Atascosito Road . By 1828 the community comprised a population of about 200, three general stores, two taverns, a hotel, a blacksmith shop, and some forty or fifty log cabins. Ten of the inhabitants were Hispanic, and the rest were of American or European origin; males outnumbered females ten to one. The town, generally called simply San Felipe, was the unquestioned social, economic, and political center of the Austin colony. Its expanding but unstable population was swelled by large numbers of immigrants and other transients. Austin built a residence on Bullinger's Creek, a half mile west of the Brazos, from which he directed the government of his colony for four years before handing responsibility for the management of most affairs to the ayuntamiento of San Felipe in 1828. The colonial land office was headquartered in the town, and Austin assumed an active role in its operation. Regular mail service in the colony was inaugurated in 1826 when Samuel May Williams was appointed postmaster in San Felipe; with seven separate postal routes converging here, the town remained the hub of the Texas postal service until the Texas Revolution . One of the earliest newspapers in Texas, the Texas Gazette , began publication in San Felipe on September 25, 1829, under the editorship of Godwin B. Cotten . Gail Borden 's Telegraph and Texas Register , which became the unofficial journal of the revolution, was first published in San Felipe on October 10, 1835. The town's notable early inhabitants also included Josiah H. Bell, James B. Miller, Noah Smithwick, and Horatio Chriesman . Many other significant figures in early Texas history resided temporarily at San Felipe or visited periodically on business. Several large cotton plantations were established in the bottomlands near the town during the 1820s, and from the outset San Felipe became a trading center for the staple. By 1830 John Cummins had constructed a grist and lumber mill near the town. As stock raising developed in the vicinity, small herds of cattle were driven from the town across the country to Nacogdoches. San Felipe was located only some eighty miles above the mouth of the Brazos, and keelboats were used extensively to transport goods between the town and various coastal ports. Nevertheless, most articles of commerce were carried overland to the coast by wagon until after the revolution. Unreliable water levels and turbulenc

Tsha Handbook → · 4.6 mi away

Elemelech Swearingen

1831

(September 25, 1805 - May 15, 1887) Austin County pioneer and Texas War for Independence veteran, Elemelech Swearingen, was born in Shepherdsville, Kentucky (Bullitt Co.) in 1805. He married Angelina Weeks (1811-1883) in 1827 and in 1831, moved with his family to Texas. The Swearingens became the last additions to Stephen F. Austin's Old 300 when another family withdrew their application. Swearingen built a farm, settling on land near what became the community of Millheim, in present-day Austin County. The Swearingens were among the earliest settlers in this area, where they raised nine children and lived the rest of their lives. Elemelech Swearingen was a leader in Millheim and served as the community's first postmaster. During the Texas Revolution, Elemelech Swearingen served as a second sergeant in the 1st Regiment Infantry, Company B under Captain Amasa Turner. He later served in the ill-fated Mier Expedition. Angelina Swearingen died in 1883, and Elemelech died in 1887. Their burial site is on their land near their former home. For his military service, Elemelech received a headright of land in Callahan County. Swearingen Road runs through his former Austin County property, near his gravesite. Today, Elemelech Swearingen is remembered as an early Austin County pioneer and as a patriot who fought for Texas Independence. (2008)

Historical Marker → · 3.1 mi away

Ernest Witte Site

-2700

The Ernest Witte Site, an aboriginal cemetery, is located on a bluff overlooking the Brazos River in Austin County, about forty miles west of Houston. A low sandy knoll marks its location. In the 1930s Ernest Witte and his brother, then young boys living on a nearby farm, began digging for a treasure that they believed an eccentric uncle had buried in the area. In a deep hole dug into the sandy knoll they found human bones. In 1974 Witte relayed this information to a team of field archeologists from the Texas Archeological Survey of the University of Texas at Austin, which was investigating prehistoric Indian sites on land where the Houston Lighting and Power Company proposed to build the Allens Creek Nuclear Generating Station. The Ernest Witte Site was therefore included in the investigation, which was sponsored by the company. The site is coincidentally located where engineers planned to place one of the reactors for the nuclear plant. Excavations began in 1974 and continued into 1975. The field crew was headed by Grant D. Hall and under the general supervision of David S. Dibble, director of the Texas Archeological Survey. The site contained the skeletal remains of 238 people buried at various times over a period of more than 4,000 years, from 2700 B.C. to A.D. 1500. Reflecting the gradual accumulation of soil on the site and its periodic use as a burial ground by local prehistoric Indian populations, the burials occurred as four distinct, superimposed groups separated by layers of soil in a deposit with a maximum depth of about eight feet. The group of skeletons buried deepest in the site, and hence the oldest, contained the remains of an estimated sixty-one people. Radiocarbon assays indicate that these earliest burials occurred between 2700 and 1600 B.C. These Group 1 burials, affiliated with the Middle Archaic Period, thus constitute the oldest human cemetery presently known in Texas. Artifacts were placed in the graves of seven people. A Pedernales dart point and some pencil-shaped bone implements represent the complete array of grave goods for these Middle Archaic burials. Remains in the next layer were interred in the period from 600 B.C. to A.D. 300. This layer, designated Group 2, contained the skeletal remains of 145 people. Numerous interesting and significant artifacts were placed in the graves of these Late Archaic people. Seventy, or 48 percent, of the burials in Group 2 contained artifacts. Among these were dart points, marine-shell ornaments, corner-tang chert knives, boatstones, a ground-stone gorget, a graphite abrader, red jasper pebbles, ocher, biotite schist, various worked bone artifacts, and deer skulls and antlers. The rocks out of which some of the boatstones and the ground-stone gorget were made originated in the Ouachita Mountains of Arkansas. This fact suggests that the people represented by the Group 2 remains were participants in a far-reaching exchange network. Five of the people in Group 2 apparently died violently, as indicated by chert dart points stuck into their bones. Above Group 2 was a third layer of burials consisting of ten individuals. Group 3 developed in the period from A.D. 550 to 950. Only one individual in this group had grave inclusions. Scattered about the chest of an adult male were seven chert projectile points. The final use of the Ernest Witte Site as a cemetery was evidenced by a shallowly buried layer of the skeletons of thirteen people. These Group 4 burials, assigned to the Late Prehistoric Period, were probably interred well after A.D. 1000. No artifacts were found in any of these latest graves on the site. Development of cemeteries in Middle and Late Archaic times at Allens Creek and elsewhere on the Texas coastal plain has been interpreted as evidence for substantial growth of human populations in the region. As these people were hunters and gatherers who lived off the natural products of the land, it may have become necessary to define territories containing adeq

Tsha Handbook → · 4.6 mi away

Oliver, Asa Thompson

1868

Asa Thompson Oliver, planter, was born on November 14,1819, in Elbert County, Georgia, the son of Simeon and Mildred Oliver. He moved with his wife and children from Mississippi to Texas in the mid-1850s. By 1858 he had acquired almost a half league of prime farmland in the Hempstead area east of the Brazos River in Austin County, now in Waller County. That year his estate, which included seventy slaves, was valued at almost $48,000. By 1860 he had accumulated 105 slaves and held property worth $205,000, ranking him among the county's wealthiest residents. Following the outbreak of the Civil War in the spring of 1861, Oliver was chosen to help organize public defense as a member of the Central Executive Committee of Austin County. Like most large planters he was badly damaged by the Confederate defeat and emancipation; by mid-1865 his estate had plummeted in value to $25,000. In 1866 he and his wife and three children joined the postbellum emigration of former Confederates to Latin America; they settled in the colony of Santa Barbara D'Oeste in the Campinas district of São Paulo province, Brazil. There Oliver purchased an extensive plantation and a number of slaves and began cultivating his property. Unfortunately, his wife, Beatrice, and daughter, Indiana, who had suffered chronic distress since the end of the war and remained debilitated during the voyage to Brazil, contracted tuberculosis. Beatrice succumbed to the disease on July 13, 1868. Since there were no non-Catholic cemeteries nearby, Oliver devoted a small corner of one of his fields to burials and interred his wife there. Indiana, age seventeen, died on April 19, 1869, of the disease and was buried near her mother. That same year Oliver's younger daughter, Mildred, fourteen, distraught over the deaths of her mother and sister and burdened with the care of her father and younger brother, also fell gravely ill; she died shortly before Christmas and was interred beside her loved ones. The family burial ground, known as the "Campo," became a significant Protestant cemetery for the American settlers of the vicinity. A. T. Oliver was buried beside his family after he was murdered by one of his slaves on July 28, 1873. Subsequent owners of the Oliver property erected a small chapel on the cemetery grounds.

Tsha Handbook → · 4.6 mi away

Hess-Kollatschny Farm House

1876

Austrian-born Henry Hess (1851-1914) and his wife Fransiska (Schlapota) (b. 1854) built this cottage in 1876-77 in the German settlement of Cat Spring. Purchased by Charles (b. 1875) and Fannie (b. 1879) Kollatschny in 1904, the home was enlarged about 1915 and remained in that family over 50 years. Now located northwest of its original location, it features the original cypress siding and interior stenciling. The fine German craftsmanship is a tribute to Austin County's early settlers. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1982

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Cat Spring

1832

A pioneer German settlement founded in 1832 by members of the Amsler, Kleberg and Von Roeder families.

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Cat Spring, Texas

Music in Cat Spring

Songs About Cat Spring

Artists From Cat Spring

Rivers & Roads in Song near Cat Spring

History of Cat Spring

Salt Grass Trail Ride — Cat Spring Start RoadyGoat

The Town That Walked to the Railroad RoadyGoat

Sixty-Seven Years of School, Then a Sign in the Grass RoadyGoat

San Felipe de Austin, TX

Elemelech Swearingen

Ernest Witte Site

Oliver, Asa Thompson

Hess-Kollatschny Farm House

Cat Spring

Things to Do in Cat Spring

Everything Near Cat Spring