Knippa, Texas

Everything Knippa is known for

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Music in Knippa

Songs About Knippa

all my ex's live in texas
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Artists From Knippa

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Rivers & Roads in Song near Knippa

Songs written about the waterways and highways that run near Knippa.

Frio River 13 songs US Route 90 9 songs Nueces River 3 songs Interstate 35 43 songs

Musical Heritage

The Opera House the Vice President Bought RoadyGoat

You're outside the Grand Opera House on North Street in Uvalde, a brick building that's been standing since 1891 and is reportedly the second-oldest opera house in Texas. In 1917 it was bought by John Nance Garner, the Uvalde native who went on to become Vice President of the United States. Garner set up his office in the corner room and positioned his desk chair in the turret windows, so he could watch over his hometown. The Garner estate sold the building to the City of Uvalde in 1978 for ten dollars, and after a restoration effort that started the following year, it reopened in 1982. It's still an active theater today, hosting plays and concerts under the same roof where Uvalde gathered more than a century ago. Not many opera houses this old are still turning the house lights on for a live show.

RoadyGoat → · 11.4 mi away

History of Knippa

Uvalde County, TX RoadyGoat

On March 29, 2017, 13 senior citizens from the First Baptist Church of New Braunfels were killed in a collision between a pickup truck and a church minivan on U.S. Highway 83 near Garner State Park in Uvalde County. The crash was one of the deadliest in the county's memory.

RoadyGoat → · 8.6 mi away

Uvalde County, TX RoadyGoat

Uvalde County's history is marked by a series of significant events. Juan de Ugalde, the Spanish governor of Coahuila, led a decisive victory over the Apaches near modern-day Utopia in 1790, an event that led to the naming of Cañon de Ugalde. The county was later established in 1850 and organized in 1856. It was founded by Reading Wood Black, who also founded the city of Uvalde. The county experienced conflict between Mexicans and Anglos, with laws in 1857 prohibiting Mexicans from traveling through the area. During the Civil War, Uvalde County residents voted against secession from the Union, but the post-war period was marked by lawlessness and violence. The county also saw the introduction of Angora goats in the 1880s, which eventually outnumbered cattle. The Civilian Conservation Corps built Garner State Park in 1941, and the National Fish Hatchery was established in 1935, originally focusing on raising catfish, largemouth bass, and sunfish.

8.6 mi away

Uvalde County, TX RoadyGoat

William M. Landrum introduced Angora goats to Uvalde County in the 1880s, and by the turn of the century, goats outnumbered cattle in the area. The local bee industry also developed a product that received first place in the 1900 Paris World's Fair.

8.6 mi away

Knippa, TX

1880

Knippa, originally known as Chatfield, is on the Southern Pacific Railroad, U.S. Highway 90, and the Frio River, between Sabinal and Uvalde in southeastern Uvalde County. It was named for founder George Knippa, who moved his family to the site in the 1880s. Knippa had been a frequent visitor to the semiarid Frio River area of Uvalde County in the 1870s and early 1880s, a period of abundant rainfall in the area, and witnessed an open country of luxuriant grazing land traversed by spring-fed rivers. He moved his family from Fayette County to the railroad siding of Chatfield soon after the Galveston, Harrisburg and San Antonio Railway had extended its railroad line west from San Antonio to Uvalde. The period of abundant rainfall in the Frio River region ended with the drought of the early 1890s, dashing the hopes of many of the farming families who had followed Knippa to the area. Around 1900 the rains returned, and a new wave of settlers, mostly Germans, moved to Knippa. A post office was opened in 1898. On February 16, 1898, the Uvalde County Commissioners Court established School District No. 12 at Knippa and authorized a school building. In 1900 fourteen students attended the one-teacher school. A two-room school was built in 1907. A mine for traprock, an igneous rock used in road construction, was opened west of Knippa around 1905 and attracted Mexican laborers to the area. The traprock quarried at Knippa was used to ballast the Southern Pacific Railroad. Because the quarry was originally opened up as a gold mine, it was said that all of the railroad ballast contained a small amount of gold. Most of the original settlers in the community were Lutherans. A Lutheran church was built on land donated by George Knippa in 1910. Church services, directed by Rev. Gottlieb Langer, were conducted in German. At the beginning of World War I , however, the Uvalde Council of Defense prohibited the use of German. The community responded by taking the council to court, and the prohibition was eventually rescinded by the United States Supreme Court. By 1914 Knippa had a population of fifty, telephone connections, two cotton gins, two general stores, and two lumber companies. The St. Joseph's Church, a Catholic mission, was constructed in 1913 through the efforts of Mr. and Mrs. W. F. Knippa. In 1915 a Baptist church was built in the community, with Reverend Rubottom as minister. A two-room school building was built in 1907. The school was moved to a brick structure in 1924 and was accredited in 1926. A small one-room school, constructed in 1927, served as a catechetical center and was the site of many Mexican-American social events. In 1929 Knippa had a estimated population of 400 and twelve businesses; by 1933 the population had dropped to an estimated 150. By the end of World War II and for the four succeeding decades the population was 325. In 1944 the Methodist, Baptist, and Church of Christ congregations were holding regular services at Knippa; the Church of Christ constructed a new building in 1948. Rev. Raymond Wolf, pastor of the Knippa Lutheran Church between 1957 and 1967, was selected Rural Minister of the Year for Texas in 1964. In 1990 St. Joseph's Catholic Church, Emmanuel Lutheran Church, and the Church of Christ were active in Knippa. The population was 360, and the town had nine businesses. In 2000 the town had 739 inhabitants and nineteen businesses.

Tsha Handbook →

Knippa Trap Rock Plant

1907

Volcanic lava deposited here more than 60 million years ago cooled and hardened over time to form basalt, a dark igneous rock also known as trap rock. M. B. (Pete) Walcott purchased acreage here about 1904 and in 1907 formed the Genevieve Mining Co. to search for gold. Although little gold was found, substantial quantities of high quality trap rock were discovered. The Texas Trap Rock Company established a quarry about 1911 and shipments of rock began in 1912. A large highly-visible screening house was completed in 1914. By 1919 Knippa's trap rock plant, the largest in Texas at that time, was capable of producing about 100,000 tons of trap rock per year. The company transported the trap rock by spur line to the Southern Pacific Railroad in nearby Knippa. The company and its employees became an integral part of the community. Knippa High School named its football team the "Rockcrushers" in 1946. The trap rock operation, purchased by White's Mine Company in 1968, was acquired by Vulcan Materials Company in 1987. Trap rock has been applied to various uses such as railroad ballast, decorative stone, and as insulation material. Its historic and primary use, however, has been as a road paving material. 1994

Historical Marker →

Knippa

1882

Served by the Texas & New Orleans Railroad since 1882, this area was settled in 1887 by George Knippa. A freighter who worked between East Texas and Mexico, Knippa also encouraged many friends to move to the fertile land of this county. In 1899 gold-mining was tried here by an aged, white-bearded stranger known as Wilson. In 1900 the community acquired a post office and in 1909 a town was laid out. Previously called Chatfield, it was renamed Knippa. The Trap Rock Mine, a stone and gravel business which started in 1913, is still in operation. 1969

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Emmanuel Lutheran Church

1904

This church traces its origins to 1904 when nine charter members led by the Rev. Gottlieb Langner organized a congregation in Knippa. Services were held in the homes of its members, who were served by area pastors and traveling missionaries. George Knippa, for whom the town was named and a charter member of the church, died in 1905. The land he donated in his will to be used for a Lutheran Church was exchanged for this church site. A wooden church with a 67-foot bell tower was built in 1910. Pastor Langner became the first full-time pastor in 1912, organizing a Sunday School and choir. The German-speaking congregation conducted its services in German. During World War I, a Uvalde County resolution prohibited the use of the German language. Challenged and appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1918, the court ruled it was a matter for the church to decide. German was spoken in church until 1942. A new sanctuary was constructed for the growing congregation, and was dedicated on the 50th anniversary of the church's founding in 1954. A new parsonage, annex and fellowship hall were later added. This church continues to serve its membership and the community as it has for more than 90 years. (1996)

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Kincaid Site

-11000

Kincaid Site (Kincaid Rockshelter, Kincaid Shelter, 41UV2) is an archeological site near the Sabinal River in Uvalde County consisting of a rockshelter and an open area in front of the shelter. Stratified deposits in both areas contained archeological materials attributable to most of the regional prehistoric sequence, and a small number of historic objects of late nineteenth and twentieth century age were found in the shelter. A great hole was dug in the center of the rockshelter sometime in the 1940s, evidently by treasure-hunters, because in December of 1947 three students (Charles E. Mear, David S. Proper, and James Churchwell) from Southwest Texas State Teachers College at San Marcos found the dirt from the hole to be rich in artifacts. Mear with occasional help from Kenneth Rochat recovered artifacts from that dirt over the next several months until, upon finding Folsom Points of Paleoindian age, he reported the site to professional archeologists. An excavation of the rockshelter portion of the site was mounted in 1948 by a team from the Texas Memorial Museum led by Elias H. Sellards and Glen L. Evans. Their work defined six geologic strata and an artificial stone pavement in the shelter. From the base upward these are: (Stratum 1) river silt in excess of 1.8 m thick without artifacts or fossils; (Stratum 2) another silt deposit 1 m thick without artifacts, but the fossilized jaw of an extinct horse was found; (Stratum 3) a deposit of clay 0.5 m thick, highly plastic when wet, that formed in a spring-fed pool and contained fossil bones of extinct mammoth, jaguar, another cat, ground sloth, horse, camel, bison, wolf, antelope, raccoon, alligator, and turtles; (Stone Pavement) a large quantity of boulders from the Sabinal River had been carefully placed across the top of the clay while it was still wet and plastic as evidenced by the stones being partly embedded in the clay; (Stratum 4) a layer of gritty clay rested directly on the stone pavement and contained a small number of stone artifacts as well as the bones of slider turtle, alligator, pocket mouse, badger, raccoon, box turtle, horse, and mammoth; (Stratum 5) a cultural midden deposit close to 1 m in average thickness composed of ashy, silty dust, fire-cracked rocks, broken and burned bones, mussel shells, and prehistoric artifacts; (Stratum 6) a 70 cm thick midden deposit of loose ashy dust, charcoal, burned rock, bone, shell, pottery, and various artifacts of stone from the prehistoric period as well as a few pieces of metal and glass of the early historic period. On top of stratum 6 at the time the shelter was investigated were several piles of disturbed fill that had been dug up by persons evidently in search of treasure thought to be buried in the shelter. These piles contained mixed artifacts of different ages. Strata 1–3 are culturally sterile. The Stone Pavement and the artifacts in the lower part of Stratum 4 are identified as being of Clovis cultural affiliation. In the upper part of Stratum 4 Sellards and Evans found a partial skeleton of a fossilized bison believed to correspond to other bison bones and five Folsom points found in fill from the large treasure-hunters' pit. Stratum 5 artifacts are diagnostic of most of the long Archaic period, and Stratum 6 cultural materials belong predominantly to the Late Prehistoric and the Historic periods. Kincaid rockshelter provides important evidence that its Clovis occupants built the stone pavement, manufactured stone tools, and consumed a variety of large and small animals probably near 11,000 years ago. Among the Clovis artifacts is the base of a biface made of obsidian identified by trace-element analysis as originating in the state of Querétaro, Mexico, 1,000 km south of the site. A short time later, probably near 10,500 years ago, a bison wounded with at least five Folsom projectiles evidently died in the shelter but was not retrieved by the hunters who wounded it. Throughout the remainder of its estimated

Tsha Handbook → · 8.9 mi away

Blewett, TX

1888

Blewett, a mining community originally known as Carbonville, is on Farm Road 1022 and Turkey Creek five miles southeast of Cline in far southwestern Uvalde County. Outcroppings of limestone rock asphalt cover 50,000 to 60,000 acres in the area. The Lathe Carbon Company, formed, according to one source, by a group of New York capitalists, opened a bitumen mine at the site in 1888. Failure to sell its bitumen, in a market limited to the paint and varnish industry, forced the company to close before its second year. Beaumont capitalist John Blewett Smyth, for whom the community was probably named, used bituminous limestone to develop a new road-paving material in 1912. The first production of limestone rock asphalt for street and road surfacing began at the Blewett location in 1912. A post office opened at the community in 1928, two years after it had become the terminus of a spur line from the Texas and New Orleans Railroad at Cline. The township is often designated as Mine No. 2 to distinguish it from Smyth Mine No. 1, a mile distant. High-grade commercial asphalt was produced at an average annual rate of 1,250,000 tons during peak production in 1927, and 125,000 tons during the 1930s. By 1940 many of Blewett's buildings had been abandoned, though a school and a commissary were still in operation there. Although the community reported an estimated population of only fifty in 1940, some evidence suggests that it had as many as 500 residents during periods of peak operation at the mines. In 1948 Blewett had the asphalt mine, a nine-section group dwelling, a hotel or tourist camp, one additional business, a school, and a scattering of residences. Although the Missouri Pacific rail service to Uvalde was discontinued in April 1966, the railroad continued service to the Uvalde Rock Asphalt Company and White's Uvalde Mines near Blewett. By 1988 Blewett had an estimated population of twenty-five and two businesses, one of which housed the post office. The population was still reported as twenty-five in 1990, but dropped to ten in 2000.

Tsha Handbook → · 8.9 mi away

Things to Do in Knippa

food 24.1 mi away
Desi's Restaurant

Family-style Mexican on US Highway 57 in tiny Batesville. Homemade tortillas, hearty plates, and a reputation as the best Mexican food in a small South Texas…

Everything Near Knippa

93 stories, landmarks & places within ~20 miles — the same local lore RoadyGoat plays as you drive through.

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