Texas Time Travel

Historic Overnights: Mason

This neighborly town in the northern hill country is as quaint as they come with a nostalgic town square and surrounding countryside boasting some of the state's best hunting (deer and topaz). But if you were here more than a century and a half ago, you wouldn't dare call this place charming, unless you were a bandit lying in ambush, waiting for the next stagecoach to pass by...

Credit: Wingman Photography
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Into the Frontier

The trip along Highway 29 between Llano and Mason, conducted at any point before the modernization of the automobile, is almost impossible to fathom. The scenery is all scrub and mountains (or at least, what passes for them in the hill country), as beautiful as it is unforgiving.

Credit: Wingman Photography

Out of the rocky landscape emerges a charming small town with a picture-perfect courthouse square and sturdy buildings constructed of a distinctive red sandstone. You think, "What salvation this town must have been for those trekking through the countryside a century and a half ago!"

But you would be dead wrong.

Back then, this frontier had a reputation for violence, and the town's first decades were marked by tension, fear, and frequent bloodshed.

About this Project

Launched in 2023, Historic Overnights is an initiative of the Texas Historical Commission's Heritage Tourism Program. This unique community partnership brings together preservation professionals and property owners to research the stories and people that bring these historic buildings to life.

Local partnerships are essential to this project, and many of the stories that follow would not have been discovered without the help of our partners at the Mason County Historical Commission—in particular, local historian and author, Scott Zesch—and the Mason Chamber of Commerce.

Danger Abounds!

Once the territory of Apache and Comanche tribes, the establishment of Fort Mason soon brought soldiers' families to the territory, followed by German Texans expanding north from Fredericksburg. With so many different peoples descending upon this area, its no wonder that violence dominated the area in the middle of the 19th century. When a stagecoach line was established between San Antonio and San Diego in 1857, the route through Mason became the stomping ground of outlaws and bandits.

An 1850 map of Texas indicates the "Range of the Comanches" in relation to the land promised under the Fisher-Miller Grant.
Credit: University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History.

Settling in Comanche Territory

Though the wilderness of Mason County persisted well into the 19th century, by the mid-1840's German settlement of Texas was making its way north from Fredericksburg. Despite being a Comanche hunting ground, a new colonization grant covering the area of present day Mason County offered German farmers large tracts of land (640 acres for a family, 320 acres for a single man) which were, to some, worth the risk of attack. Source.

Pictured: A. W. Kothe, his wife Johanna, their four children, and Wilhelm and Joanna Kothe. Date unknown.
Credit: Texas State Historical Association. The Texas Historian, Volume 32, Number 1, September 1971, periodical, September 1971.

Meusebach’s German Settlers

In 1847, Wilhelm Kothe (far right) was among the forty or so men who ventured with John O. Meusebach into Comanchería to seek out a peace treaty that would assure the safety of German settlers in Comanche territory. Source.

Pictured: A watercolor done by Thomas Flintoff in 1852 depicts the once bustling port of Indianola, the primary landing point for German immigrants bound for West Texas.
Credit: Public Domain. MFA Houston, The Bayou Bend Collection.

The year prior, Kothe had traveled by boat from Germany to Indianola, where he secured a ride via oxcart to New Braunfels and then on to Fredericksburg. Since he elected to travel alone and spare his fiancé the long, uncomfortable journey, he was only granted the 320-acre plot allotted to single men.

Pictured: National Intelligencer (Washington D.C.) May 13, 1847. The treaty between Meusebach and the Comanche Chiefs was so momentous, that national newspapers reported the occasion.
Credit: Portal to Texas History.

A Daring Expedition into Comancheria

This new settlement was largely facilitated by the Fisher-Miller Land Grant, a colonization grant bestowed to Henry Fisher and Burchard Miller in 1842 by the Republic of Texas to help establish a German colony in the land between the Colorado and Llano Rivers, or about three-million acres. Perhaps because it took several years for the grant to be fulfilled (Fisher and Miller were hard pressed to find a surveyor or government official willing to venture so deep into Comanche territory) they eventually sold their interests to the Adelsverein (the Society for the Protection of German Immigrants in Texas), an organization established by German elites to foster the preservation of German values and traditions within German emigrant communities. Source. Eventually, an 1847 armed expedition led by John O. Meusebach, a representative of Adelsverein, was able to strike a deal with Comanche Chiefs Buffalo Hump, Santa Anna, and others. The terms of their treaty stipulated that Meusebach's settlers could go unharmed into Comanche territory, and likewise, Comanche could safely enter German settlements. Source.

This map (ca. 1860) traces the route followed by the 35th Infantry Division from San Antonio to Fort Mason.
Credit: University of North Texas Libraries, Portal Texas History.

The Raids Continue

Despite Muesbach's treaty, raids and attacks on isolated German settlements continued as Native groups responded to the rapid encroachment upon their land and hunting ground. Without the guarantee of immunity, many of the German settlers who had received tracts through the Fisher-Miller Land Grant eventually sold their plots and settled in safer territory, closer to Fredericksburg. Source.

With the advent of the California Gold Rush in 1849, even more settlers, these ones argonauts or "gold seekers," found themselves trekking west on the Upper Emigrant Road, straight into Comanchería. To protect these travelers as well as stagecoaches carrying both passengers and mail to and from western territories, a series of military forts were established along the route. On July 6, 1851, Fort Mason was established on Post Oak Hill near Comanche creek, so named for the surrounding hills in which Comanche were said to lay in ambush. Source. This military post would serve as the area's front-line defense against raiders that targeted coaches and wagons on their way deeper into the western frontier. Source.

Progress in Fits and Starts

After the fort's establishment, German immigrants felt safer moving north from Fredericksburg to the Llano River, establishing a line of scattered settlements. From the southeastern states, descendants of old American families were drawn here by the open grasslands with their ever-flowing springs, ravines, and creeks. Though its violent episodes weren't over with—indeed, one of the greatest feuds in Texas history would engulf the area in the years after the Civil War—Mason had at least the semblance of a path to progress.

Hasse House, a farmhouse built in 1883 by German settlers, Heinrich and Fredricka Hasse.
Credit: Courtesy of owner.

Book a Topaz Hunt

Thanks to its position on the Llano Uplift, the land around Mason yields a rare blue topaz (the state gem) found only in this part of the state.

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Catch a Flick at the Odeon

Mason's neon-lit Odeon Theater was built in 1928 and is the longest continually operating theater in west Texas, still showing new releases every week.

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Enter the Bat Cave

Though the Eckert James River Bat Cave is one of the largest bat nurseries in the country, it was once ranch owner W. Phillip Eckert's personal cache of bat guano.

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Use the dots above to explore nearby activities with a historical twist.

Side Trip:
Historic Properties in Llano

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