DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Way out in Uvalde County, in a canyon that still holds its secrets close, there's a place called Old Waresville — and the story starts, as so many Texas stories do, with a man who'd already proven himself on a field that changed everything. Captain William Ware was a veteran of the Battle of San Jacinto.
He'd been there. And in 1852, he turned his eyes toward the Sabinal Canyon and decided to build something that had never existed in Uvalde County before: the first nonmilitary colony. Not a fort.
Not a garrison. A home. He put up a log cabin with his own hands, and that cabin — now here's the part that ought to stop you cold — that cabin was still standing when this marker was written.
Think on that a moment. Still standing. Captain Ware wasn't alone out there for long.
Gideon Thompson came, and with him his wife — the first Anglo-American woman in Sabinal Canyon. First. In the whole canyon.
You have to imagine what that meant, the kind of quiet courage that required, settling into a place that beautiful and that unforgiving all at once. Other settlers followed, and for a few years Waresville took root and grew. Then came the Indian raids, running hard from 1856 all the way to 1866.
A full decade of it. The colony lost settlers. The marker doesn't dress that up, and neither will I.
People who had built their lives there were gone. And yet — yet — Waresville did not disappear. In 1856, Charles Durbon put up the first store and the first post office.
The community kept its grip. By the 1870s, Joel Fenley and John Ware were building homes of native stone, the kind of stone that doesn't apologize to weather or to time. Now, the post office eventually moved on — packed up and went to Utopia in 1883 — and that's the kind of thing that can quietly end a place.
But what remained at Old Waresville tells you more than what left. The cemetery is still there. And in that cemetery, Captain William Ware himself was buried in 1853 — just one year after he'd founded the very colony that carries his name.
He built the first cabin. He started the first nonmilitary colony in the county. And then he was gone, leaving behind a settlement that somehow, stubbornly, kept on being.
The stone homes. The old store site. The cemetery.
Out in Sabinal Canyon, Old Waresville is still holding its ground.
What the marker says
First nonmilitary colony in Uvalde County, founded 1852 by Capt. William Ware, veteran of Battle of San Jacinto. Ware built first log cabin home (still standing). Other early settlers included Gideon Thompson, whose wife was first Anglo-American woman in Sabinal Canyon. Colony lost settlers in Indian Raids, 1856-1866. Although the post office moved to Utopia in 1883, still here is the cemetery where Capt. Ware was buried in 1853; first store and post office built by Charles Durbon, 1856; homes of Joel Fenley, John Ware, built of native stone, 1870's. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark, 1966.