DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and here's how I'm gonna tell it to you. The town of Sabinal, out in Uvalde County — even the name carries a story in it. Spanish named it for the Rio Sabina and the cypress trees standing along the river.
You picture those trees, tall and still, roots down in that Texas water, and you get a sense of the kind of place this was before anybody built a single thing on it. Then came 1854, and a man named Thomas B. Hammer changed that.
He founded the town, ran a stage shop, and served as its first postmaster — which, in those days, meant you were about as essential to a community as the water itself. Now, founding a town in that country in 1854 was not a quiet undertaking. The marker speaks plainly of Indian depredations — real danger, real cost — and yet the settlers kept coming, kept building homes, kept putting roots down the way those cypress trees had done along the river.
The town thrived anyway. Then 1881 rolled around and a railroad reached Sabinal, which had a way of changing everything for a place. Towns on the line had a future; towns off it were left to wonder.
Sabinal was on it. By 1906, the town was incorporated, telephone service started, a city waterworks was organized, and a volunteer fire department got itself together — all of it in that same year, like Sabinal decided to do a whole decade's worth of growin' in one go. The very next year, 1907, Sabinal Christian College was founded.
A college. Out here. That's ambition wearing boots.
It ran until 1917, when it closed — ten years of higher learning in a town that not so long before had been fighting just to survive. In the early nineteen hundreds, cotton was the foremost industry, the crop that drove the economy and put money in pockets across the community. And today — farming and ranching, still flourishing, still the backbone of Sabinal.
Those cypress trees watched all of it: the stage coach dust, the railroad iron, the cotton fields, the telephone wires going up. Some towns fade. Sabinal just kept on growin'.
What the marker says
Named by Spanish for Rio Sabina and Cypress trees along river. Town founded in 1854 by Thomas B. Hammer who operated a stage shop and was first postmaster. Despite Indian depredations, town thrived as settlers built homes, and a railroad reached here in 1881. In 1906, town was incorporated. Telephone service started. City water works and volunteer fire department organized. In 1907, Sabinal Christian College was founded. Closed in 1917. Cotton industry was foremost in early 1900's. Today, farming and ranching flourishing in community. (1967)