Wimberley

The road along this ridge, Ranch Road 32, is a well known Hill Country drive. The ridge itself is called the Devil's Backbone. Read more Its limestone began as mud on the floor of a shallow sea, roughly 100 to 120 million years ago. Much later, along the Balcones fault zone, the land cracked and shifted, and the edge of the Edwards Plateau was carved into hills like these.

Ashe juniper and live oak cover the slopes. On wooded slopes like these, the golden-cheeked warbler nests each spring, and it nests nowhere else on earth. The ridge has its legends, too: ghost stories of Spanish monks, Comanche riders and Confederate soldiers, gathered into books by a local writer. But the oldest story here is written in the stone, and in the water moving through it.

In the bed of a creek northwest of town lies a small, deep opening called Jacob's Well. Beneath it is something much larger. Read more Water in the Trinity Aquifer, held under pressure deep in the Cow Creek Limestone, rises here through fractures and faults and spills out at a steady 68 degrees. In 1924, the spring was measured pushing water six feet into the air, about 170 gallons every second.

The opening is only about 12 feet across. Below it, divers have mapped more than 6,000 feet of flooded passage, reaching about 140 feet down, the second longest underwater cave in Texas. A salamander lives here that is found only in springs of the Blanco River watershed. And for as long as there are records, this spring has been the source of Cypress Creek.

From the well, Cypress Creek runs about five miles down to the Blanco River, through the middle of what is now Wimberley. It was once called Jacob's Well Creek. Read more Bald cypress and pecan line its banks, and along its course other springs add their water, among them a spring-fed pool known as the Blue Hole.

In 1847, a surveyor named Bartlett Sims laid out five tracts of land, each with a corner at the spring. The creek offered two things settlers prized. Its cypress gave timber that resisted rot. Its current could turn a wheel. Before long, both would bring men with saws and millstones to its banks. At the foot of the town, the creek's own journey ends, where it joins a larger river.

The Blanco River runs the length of this valley, and at Wimberley it takes in Cypress Creek. Read more It rises from springs in Kendall County and flows 87 miles to the San Marcos River, draining more than 400 square miles of the Hill Country. In 1721, members of the Aguayo expedition named it for the white limestone along its banks and in its bed. Blanco means white.

In places the river slips underground and reappears downstream. Upstream, dinosaur tracks are pressed into its bed. Most days it is a clear, quiet stream over limestone ledges, shaded by cypress. But this valley lies in what Texans call Flash Flood Alley, where steep hills and thin soils send rain racing into the rivers. A river gauge in Wimberley keeps the Blanco's record. That record is not quiet.

Lone Man Creek bends through quiet ranch land northeast of Wimberley. A historical marker near here tells a story it calls local lore. In March 1840, Comanche leaders came to San Antonio to talk peace. Read more The talks ended in bloodshed, the Council House Fight, in which Comanche leaders were killed. That summer, Comanche warriors struck back in a great raid that reached the coastal town of Linnville.

On the way home, they were met at Plum Creek by about 200 Texas Rangers and volunteers, with Lipan Apache allies. "According to local lore," the marker says, several warriors were pursued to this bend of Lone Man Creek, hid their horses, and took cover in tall grass and an oak mott, a grove of trees. At nightfall, their pursuers withdrew. The marker ends: "By moonlight, the Comanche buried their dead under flat rocks and disappeared into the hills."

On a limestone rise above Cypress Creek stands the oldest house in Wimberley still on its original site. It was built by William Carvin Winters, a woodcarver who had been badly wounded at San Jacinto in 1836. Read more On June 4, 1856, he paid $25 for a tract on the creek beside a small trading post, and began building a mill.

A historical marker gives the year as 1848, but the county's deed records say 1856. His grist mill and sawmill turned out meal and lumber, and his workshop made plows, hoes, wagons and nails. His stone house, with walls 18 inches thick, went up in the late 1850s. Today it is the Wimberley Valley Museum. By 1860, more than a third of the people in Hays County were enslaved. The next year, the county voted to leave the Union, and Texas went to war.

A street beside the creek is still called Mill Race Lane, for the channel that carried Cypress Creek's water to the mill. William Winters died in 1864. Read more His daughter Nancy and her husband, John Cude, kept the mill running, and the settlement became known as Cude's Mill. A flood washed the mill out, and the Cudes rebuilt on higher ground across the creek, with a longer, wider race.

On March 5, 1874, they sold it all to Pleasant Wimberley, for $8,000 in gold. He had come down the Blanco because his wife, Amanda, wanted to live farther from Comanche raids. Under the Wimberleys, the mill also ginned cotton and made molasses. By 1878, the newspapers called the place Wimberley's Mill. In March 1880, the San Marcos Free Press reported: "The first mail left for the new post office of Wimberley, this county, on Monday morning last."

Around the square above Cypress Creek, where shops now line the streets, a village grew in the 1880s and 1890s. The railroad never came. San Marcos, the county seat, was half a day away by wagon. Read more Sidney Pyland opened a blacksmith shop here in 1895, at the age of 20, and two years later married Nellie Ann Wimberley. For 15 years he shod horses and built wagons, then moved his shop, whole, to San Marcos.

John Henry Saunders kept a store, served twice as postmaster, and became the county's first school superintendent. By 1889, the school had about 100 pupils. A water works with a cypress tank came in the 1890s, and a telephone line to San Marcos in 1899. Into the 1930s, ranchers still drove cattle and goats through these streets.

Where the mill once stood, a bank stands now. The mill's last decades were a long retreat. In the early 1880s, the cypress ran short, and the shingle mill closed. The flour mill shut down in 1893. Read more Between 1898 and 1900, the works were rebuilt to run on steam. One marker credits the rise of cotton farming, and competition from a larger mill in New Braunfels.

The older marker, on this spot, gives another reason: "the diminishing flow of Cypress Creek." It is the first sign, in this story, of the creek running low. The mill closed in 1925, and was torn down in 1934. After more than 70 years, the town named for a mill no longer had one. It would need a new way to live.

Ranch Road 12 runs from San Marcos up into the hills to Wimberley. In the 1920s, the old wagon road was graveled. Read more On January 1, 1926, it became part of State Highway 80, and in 1942, it was renamed Ranch to Market Road 12. With the road came the automobile, and with the automobile came people looking for cool water on hot summer days.

Tourist camps and summer camps spread along the creeks. At the Blue Hole, the Dobie family, who had owned it since 1897, began charging swimmers and picnickers in the 1920s. By the middle of the century, people from nearby cities were building summer homes on the rivers and creeks. The water that had once turned a mill wheel now drew visitors instead.

In 1940, the muralist and sculptor Buck Winn moved his family to a ranch in Wimberley. Born James Buchanan Winn, he was also an architect and an inventor. Read more His ranch studio doubled as a laboratory, where he patented ways of making lightweight concrete and fiberglass. He designed the United States stamp that marked a century of Texas statehood, in 1946.

In 1950, the Pearl Brewery in San Antonio commissioned his mural, "The History of Ranching." It ran 280 feet, and at the time it was believed to be the longest mural in the world. It was later taken down and put into storage. Panels were recovered, and now hang here, in the Wimberley Community Center. Winn helped organize a church, the public schools and the chamber of commerce. He was one of the first of the artists who would make this valley home.

On the Blanco, just south of town, a resort has rented cabins for nearly 80 years. In 1946, a Houston couple bought seven acres here and named the place 7A Ranch. Read more That winter they built five rock cottages, and the first guests arrived the next summer. A slab of their concrete is still stamped: "Built for Pleasure in 1946."

From about 1960, the family built an Old West town, Pioneer Town, from pieces of buildings torn down in Austin, San Antonio and Waco. It has a house made of soda bottles, and a log chapel with Lutheran doors, Catholic pews, Episcopal windows, a Methodist piano and a Baptist pulpit. A log house built in Comal County around 1850 was moved here and restored. In 2015, the river took 11 of the ranch's cabins. It is still open.

Summer in this valley came to mean children. In 1953, Carol Knolk and Jane Brown opened Rocky River Ranch, a camp for girls on the banks of the Blanco. Read more In 1966, Knolk moved an open-air movie theater to the ranch: the Corral Theatre, which twin brothers had built from cedar saplings near the square in the late 1940s.

Other camps followed. The Presbyterian church bought a ranch on the Blanco west of town in 1962, and held its first summer camp at John Knox Ranch the next year. In 1971, Camp Young Judaea, founded in Kerr County in 1952, moved to the valley. Mary Anderson, who later owned Rocky River Ranch, put it simply: "We helped put Wimberley on the map."

On the first Saturday of the month, from March through December, this field fills with booths. Market Day began in 1964, when the chamber of commerce set up stalls on the town square. Read more In 1969, the newly chartered Lions Club took it over. By 1972, a club newsletter noted that 54 booths on the square were too many, and the Lions bought seven acres here for $20,400.

Today the market covers more than 20 acres, with about 475 booths. A 2019 resolution of the Texas House credits the club with raising $4 million for the community. Around the market grew the other institutions of an artists' town: the Wimberley Players in 1979, a glassblowing studio in 1992, and the EmilyAnn Theatre in 1998.

North of town, the streets and fairways of Woodcreek spread over the hills toward Jacob's Well. Development began in the 1970s. Read more By the early 1980s there was a country club and an 18-hole golf course, and in 1984, Woodcreek became a city. On the slopes above the spring, more than 3,600 lots were platted, and the land around the well was divided among more than a hundred owners.

The well drew visitors of its own. Scuba divers came to explore its cave, and between the 1960s and 1985, at least eight of them died there. After two young men drowned in 1985, recreational diving ended. And the growing valley now drew much of its drinking water from wells in the same aquifer that fed the spring.

Today the land around Jacob's Well is a public natural area. Putting it together took two decades. In 1991, David Baker, his family and partners bought the first 25 acres. Read more In December 1996, Baker and his neighbors founded the Wimberley Valley Watershed Association. Then, in 2000, Jacob's Well stopped flowing, for the first time in recorded history. Baker later said: "I think it was a big wake-up call for the community."

The association bought an RV park, a tennis center and flood-prone condominiums, took up the pavement, and took down the buildings. In 2005, a loan secured 46 acres around the well. In 2010, Hays County paid $1.7 million for 50 acres more, land slated for dense development. Baker said then: "Jacob's Well is the heart and soul of the Wimberley Valley."

Under the cypress trees of Cypress Creek, the Blue Hole now belongs to the town. It nearly went another way. Read more In May 2000, Wimberley voted to become a city, partly out of concern about what outside developers might build. Two years later, a vote to undo the city failed. By then, a subdivision of several hundred homes was planned around the Blue Hole.

A private landowner bought the swimming hole and the land around it, and held it until the young city could raise the money. In 2005, with federal conservation funds, grants and local donations, Wimberley bought it. The restored swimming area opened in 2011, and the rest of the park, 126 acres in all, in 2012. The spring that drew paying swimmers in the 1920s is now a public park.

At the Ranch Road 12 bridge, a gauge measures the height of the Blanco. On the night of May 23, 2015, it recorded its worst flood. Ten to thirteen inches of rain fell on the river's headwaters in a few hours. Read more The National Weather Service reported that the river rose from about five feet at 9 p.m. to about 41 feet by 1 a.m. For an hour, it climbed five feet every 15 minutes. The United States Geological Survey later put the crest at 44.9 feet, more than ten feet above the record of 1929.

At least 11 people died, eight of them from one house, carried away with nine people inside. Between 350 and 400 homes were destroyed. A resort owner remembered: "All you could hear was the ancient cypress trees just snapping." The town that rebuilt called itself Wimberley Strong.

After dark, the Wimberley Valley keeps its lights low on purpose. In 2015, a volunteer committee set out to protect the night sky here, following the example of Dripping Springs, to the north. Read more In 2018, Wimberley and Woodcreek were designated together as the Wimberley Valley International Dark Sky Community, the third such community in Texas.

In 2023, DarkSky International named the valley its Dark Sky Place of the Year, citing what it called "enthusiastic and successful efforts to keep the stars shining bright in the Lone Star State." Some places in this valley are protected for what they show by day, a spring, a swimming hole, a stand of cypress. This one is protected for what can be seen only at night.

The tour ends where it began, at Jacob's Well. The spring that pushed water six feet into the air in 1924 first stopped flowing in 2000. Read more It stopped again in the years that followed, and since 2023, stopping has become ordinary. The gauge here recorded no flow on 218 days in 2023, 128 days in 2024, and 156 in 2025. In the autumn of 2026, as this tour was made, it had read zero every day since the middle of August.

Hays County names two causes: drought, and pumping from the same aquifer. Swimming at the well has been closed since 2022. The water has not vanished. It still moves through the limestone below. Whether it rises here again depends on rain, and on how much the valley draws from the ground.