Specht's Crossing

Duane's take

The official marker tells this tale, and I'm Duane, let me carry it to you. Picture a gravel bed cutting across the San Antonio-Blanco Road. No concrete, no guardrails, just the natural bottom of the crossing and whatever the river decided to put there that morning.

Area settlers climbed into their horse-drawn carriages and rolled right across it, headed for the German settlement of Spring Branch. That was the way it was done. Now, floods came through regular.

That's just the nature of a low water crossing, and anyone who's spent time in the Texas Hill Country will tell you the water doesn't ask permission before it rises. But here's the thing about those settlers. The floods kept coming, and the use of that crossing kept increasing, all the way through the years from eighteen seventy-five to nineteen-oh-six.

The flooding didn't drive them off. It just made them stubborn. Up on the hill overlooking all of this lived a man named Hans Specht, sometimes written Von Specht.

He was the Spring Branch postmaster, and he kept the post office right there in his hilltop home. Every letter, every parcel passing through Spring Branch cleared that house, and down below, every traveler cleared that gravel bed. The crossing and the postmaster's home became landmarks of each other.

And the crossing took his name. Thereafter it was known as Specht's Crossing. Times changed, as times do.

Horse-drawn carriages gave way to automobile travelers, and those drivers used the crossing too, until nineteen twenty, when a low water bridge was put in its place. Then nineteen thirty-four rolled around, and the Civil Works Administration constructed a new bridge entirely. A gravel bed crossing in the road, a postmaster on the hill, a name that outlasted the horses and the floods both.

Specht's Crossing.

What the marker says

Area settlers in horse-drawn carriages used this gravel bed low water crossing of the San Antonio-Blanco Road to reach the German settlement of Spring Branch. Despite frequent floods, use of the crossing increased during the years (1875-1906). Spring Branch postmaster Hans (Von) Specht maintained the post office in his hilltop home overlooking the crossing. Thereafter known as Specht's Crossing, it was later used by automobile travelers until replaced by a low water bridge in 1920. In 1934 a new bridge was constructed by the Civil Works Administration. (1993)