DUANE
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Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. There's a road out here, friends, that has been carrying people, stories, and secrets for longer than Texas has had a name. They call it El Camino Real.
The old San Antonio Road. And if you feel like the highway beneath your wheels has a kind of weight to it, well, you might be right. This is one of the great thoroughfares of early Texas, stretching a thousand miles from Saltillo, Mexico, all the way to present-day Louisiana.
A thousand miles. Let that settle in. Before there were towns along it, before there were names on maps, there were paths.
Ancient Indian paths. Buffalo paths. Worn into the earth by countless hooves and feet long before any surveyor ever unrolled a map.
Then in 1691, those paths became something called the Trail of the Padres, and El Camino Real sometimes followed that very same course. Think about that the next time you're just trying to make good time. You're riding a road with layers upon layers of history pressed down beneath the asphalt.
Around 1800, someone decided to make it official. The road was surveyed and given the name King's Highway. King's Highway.
That name alone tells you something about the kind of traffic this road was meant to carry. And it carried all kinds. Explorers.
Traders. Settlers looking for a new start. Armies on the move.
Smugglers who probably preferred nobody kept records. Adventurers who probably didn't care either way. All of them moving along this same corridor, this same ancient line across the land.
Now here in Burleson County, El Camino Real did something besides just connect two distant points. It served as the boundary line between two of the major early nineteenth century colonies, the colony of Stephen F. Austin on one side, and the colony of Sterling C.
Robertson on the other. Two empires of settlement, separated by a road old enough to remember when it was just a buffalo trail. And here's the quiet part that gets me every time.
The modern highway, right here, follows that historic route. The road didn't move. Everything else grew up around it.
El Camino Real just kept going, the way it always has.
What the marker says
(The old San Antonio Road) Great thoroughfare of early Texas. Following ancient Indian and buffalo paths, sometimes on same course as 1691 "Trail of the Padres", stretches 1,000 miles from Saltillo, Mexico, to present Louisiana. Highway for explorers, traders, smugglers, adventurers, settlers, armies. Was surveyed about 1800 and given name of "King's Highway". Here, as in some other areas, the modern highway follows historic El Camino Real. Also, in this particular area, El Camino Real marked boundary between the major early 19th century colonies of Stephen F. Austin and Sterling C. Robertson. (1968)