Narrative Histories

The Founding of Marble Falls

On November 9, 1881, during the second term of Gov. Oran Roberts, the State Capitol building in Austin burned. This singular misfortune would contribute directly to the founding of Marble Falls some six years later on July 12, 1887.

While Adam Rankin Johnson had the dream of building a town near the great falls on the Colorado River after he first saw the site in 1854, he was not the only one with the idea. Col. Charles Todd, from Kentucky like Johnson, had actually bought the site in the 1850s and attempted to create a town. Todd’s labor would barely get off the ground and eventually the Civil War would overshadow what was called “Todd’s Village.”

The Spanish had mapped the region early in their conquest of the New World and had noted the great falls. Ferdinand Leuters, an entomologist and part of a scientific expedition to the area, discovered Dead Man’s Hole in 1821. The Republic of Texas issued land grants to veterans of the Texas Revolution for their service in 1835-36, but these were primarily paper grants and no one settled in the area until 1846.

A map depicting the area in the 1840s would have shown that from the Pedernales River north and to the west was the territory of the Comanches and had become their winter home after driving the Lipan Apaches southwestward. At the peak of their power, the Comanches ruled over the vast area all the way to New Mexico, western Colorado and Oklahoma. There were other tribes who occupied the areas to the east and south of the Colorado River. The Tonkawa were hunter-gatherers native to the Colorado valley from the Highland Lakes to below Bastrop. They were generally friendly to settlers and served as scouts for Sam Houston in the Texas Revolution. Lipan Apaches occupied the canyon country to the southwest, and the Wacos, Kickapoos and Bosques occupied the region northeastward to the Brazos around modern day Waco. Shawnees and other displaced tribes from the Eastern United States crossed the game and fish rich area of Central Texas. The great southern buffalo herd roamed the area (the last reported buffalo shot in Burnet county was near Kingsland in 1870; it’s stuffed head is at the Ft. Croghan Museum in Burnet. These tribes were the last in some 10,000 years of continuous Native American culture in this area, according to the Nightengale Archaeological Center near Kingsland, a State Historic Landmark of a prehistoric site occupied at least for some 6,500 years on the banks of the Colorado just below and across from the mouth of the Llano River.

Outside of the treaty the Comanche made - and honored - with John O. Meusebach and the predominantly German settlements in and around Fredericksburg, the upper reaches of the Colorado were dangerous. Battalions of Texas Rangers served as the only protection for those on the frontier and the more easterly settlements of the Milam grant. The Comanches would raid deep into the new Republic of Texas, as far east as Mexia in 1836, to Bastrop and southward and down to Victoria and the coast. Noah Smithwick, as well as others, would write about those incidents as citizen posses and former Republic of Texas soldiers would chase the raiding parties back to the area near the San Saba River’s confluence with the Colorado, which normally was the center of their winter campground territory. The Comanches were a dangerous and formidable adversary to any who lingered in the region.

Settlement in Burnet County

Texas joined the Union on December 29, 1845. As relations with Mexico deteriorated on the southern border - then the Nueces River - the Texas Ranger battalions that had patrolled the range were mustered into the United States Army to serve in the Mexican-American War which quickly developed. This left the frontier basically defenseless and the outcry from settlers forced the Texas government to form new battalions of Texas Rangers. One of these battalions under Capt. Henry E. McCulloch was established some three miles south of present day Burnet on the last day of 1847.

Samuel E. Holland visited this encampment alone in July, 1848, to transact some business with his son-in-law, Lt. William B. Covington. After he finished, he rode toward Austin - southeastward - and came upon Hamilton Creek and followed it down to what is now called Mormon Mills falls, where the creek eroded a valley several hundred feet wide through solid limestone, the resulting cliffs towering over the creek which flowed over a wide bench into a beautiful, deep hole of water created by erosion and flooding. He immediately rode back to the Ranger encampment and inquired about who owned the valley. On discovering that Capt. McColloch was the attorney for John Rozier who owned the land, he bought the 1,280-acre John Rozier tract on the spot for 50 cents an acre, $640 total. Holland moved his belongings to his tract, choosing to start his future at Holland Springs near the Ranger’s encampment, thus becoming the first permanent settler in what would become Burnet County.

The state of Texas then built a series of forts in an arc from near Eagle Pass on the Rio Grande to what is now modern day Fort Worth. One of those was Ft. Croghan near Hamilton Creek, established in 1848 in what would become the town of Hamilton (now Burnet). Settlement in the area would begin from the east and from the southwest into the area between the Pedernales and Colorado Rivers. The great falls on the Colorado would become a cross roads for north-south travel from San Antonio northward to Ft. Worth. Burnet County would be organized in 1853 after Ft. Croghan was decommissioned and the US Army moved westward toward Mason to start another line of forts.

The first social gathering at the present site of Marble Falls occurred on July 4, 1854. The newly established Burnet County decided to have a great Fourth of July celebration on the banks of the Colorado at the great falls. Noah Smithwick wrote about this event in his 1899 book The Evolution of a State.

In the mid-to-late 1850s, some of the primary settlers to southern Burnet County would arrive. Capt. Jesse Burnam and his family would settle at Double Horn; William Ransom Slaughter would occupy a land grant from the Republic of Texas which included Granite Mountain and Slaughter Mountain; and the Lacy Brothers – George Washington, Francis Marion (Frank), Ewin, John Hiram (Harry) and Jacob – first settled near Rockvale between the Double Horn and Spicewood communities. G.W. and Ewin would buy Granite Mountain and surrounding land from William Ransom Slaughter on April 29, 1867, for the princely sum of $400. The granite was undeveloped, a great resource untouched until the 1880s.

Misfortune becomes Opportunity

Texas had little money to rebuild the State Capitol after it burned in 1881. The state traded 3,000,000 acres of land in the Panhandle to a construction company for the building of Capitol. The land would become the XIT ranch. At first the consensus was to use limestone in the construction; this was led by the sculptress Elizabeth Ney. However, the Oak Hill quarry just west of Austin could not produce the quantity of stone needed. In early 1885 the governor declared Texas would not use non-native stone. Family records show that former Gov. Oran Roberts would actually be the one to ask G. W. Lacy to donate the stone for the Capitol. For Adam Johnson this was the opening he needed to fulfill his dream of creating Marble Falls.

With the agreement from Lacy and his partners in Granite Mountain, F. H. Holloway and Nimrod Norton, Johnson would then address the Texas Legislature in early 1885 with the proposition that Lacy and his partners would donate the granite; that he, Johnson, would donate seven of the 16 miles of right-of-way for the needed rail line to Granite Mountain from the new rail head in Burnet and would guarantee the rest. What they asked in return was that when the Capitol was complete, the state would use its labor force to construct a two-mile spur into the soon-to-be town of Marble Falls near the junction of Whitman Branch and Backbone Creek. Soon afterward some of the state legislators rode by train to Burnet and then went to Granite Mountain to get a look at the resource. They liked what they saw and approved the deal.

The labor was also done on the cheap. Convicts were used as labor to build both the line to Granite Mountain (and later into Marble Falls) as well as to mine the granite from the mountain. A deal was cut with the director of Texas Prisons in which there were restrictions on the hours worked, numbers of prisoners which could be used, the kinds of skills required, and the supervision and control of the prisoners on the site.

The state also felt it couldn’t afford in-state stone masons and quarreled with the stone-cutters union. Although the granite itself was free, the cost of shaping and shipping the granite made it more expensive than earlier estimates for limestone. The net result was that Texas imported from Scotland a given number of stone masons and ran into great interference from the union – a conflict that would later result in a court case and fine paid by the state – but 62 Scotsmen finally landed in Galveston and accepted the job of shaping the granite that became the State Capitol.

With the deal all set, Johnson began acquiring the final title to the land to comprise Marble Falls. Earlier there had been a series of court cases arising from Col. Todd’s initial effort. When that hurdle was cleared there was still much local land in many hands, much of it belonging to the Lacy family or their descendents. Where Johnson couldn’t buy the land outright, he obtained Powers of Attorney to sell the land within the city. Johnson finally acquired all the land he needed in March of 1887. By July 6, he filed incorporation papers with Burnet County to form Texas Mining and Improvement Corporation, with the land in Marble Falls being the key asset of the company. The primary shareholders in addition to Johnson included his son, R. E. Johnson; T. E. Hammond, W. H. Badger, Brandt Badger, C. T. Dalton, W. H. Roper, George Christian, F. H. Holloway and Adam Rankin.

On July 12, 1887, TM&I began selling lots in Marble Falls. The first sale brought in over $30,000 for lots and was considered a great success. The Falls on the Colorado Museum considers this date the founding date of Marble Falls and each year commemorates the Founders on the second Saturday in July at the Pavilion in Lakeside Park overlooking what was the site of the great falls.