Seguin, Texas

Seguin, Texas
—  City  —
Guadalupe County Courthouse in Seguin
Location of Seguin, Texas
Coordinates: 29°34′28″N 97°57′55″W
Country	United States
State	Texas
County	Guadalupe
Government
• Type	Council-manager government
• Council-Manager	Mayor Don Keil Manuel E. Cevallos Mary Louise Gonzales Nick Carrillo Tomas V. Castellon, Jr. Carlos Medrano Fonda Mathis Donna Dodgen Bob Pees
• City Manager	Doug Faseler
Area
• Total	19.2 sq mi (49.7 km2)
• Land	19.0 sq mi (49.3 km2)
• Water	0.2 sq mi (0.4 km2)
Elevation	522 ft (159 m)
Population (2010)
• Total	25,175
• Density	1,311.2/sq mi (812.1/km2)
Time zone	Central (CST) (UTC-6)
• Summer (DST)	CDT (UTC-5)
ZIP codes	78155-78156
Area code(s)	830
FIPS code	48-66644
GNIS feature ID	1346881
Website	www.seguintexas.gov

Seguin (pron.: /sɨˈɡiːn/ sə-GHEEN) is a city in and the county seat of Guadalupe County, Texas, United States. As of the 2010 census, the city population was 25,175.

History

Seguin was a region once inhabited by the native hunter-gatherer Indians of Texas. Tonkawas had predominantly lived in Seguin, camping around the Guadalupe River and other streams in the area. Eventually Spanish, Mexican, and Anglo settlers started farms and ranches in the location that would become Seguin.

Jose Antonio Navarro, one of the earliest settlers and an important figure of Texas history, developed a ranch near Seguin. In 1831, land was granted to Umphries Branch by the Mexican government. The Branch and John Newton Sowell Sr. families settled in 1833 in the western part of Green DeWitt's colony. Sowell was a farmer, and in 1833 he and his brothers became the first Anglo-American immigrants to raise corn in future Guadalupe County.

Between 1827 and 1835, twenty-two families came to the area as part of the DeWitt Colony; by 1833 there were forty land titles in the region, fourteen of which received grants directly from the Mexican government. In 1836, John Gladden King lived near Seguin. His farm neighbored the Sowells on the northwest and Branch on the southeast. A son, William Philip King, reportedly was part of a cannon crew and was the youngest defender killed during the battle of the Alamo.

The town of Seguin was founded in 1838 by members of Mathew Caldwell's Gonzales Rangers. They acquired land originally granted to Umphries Branch, who had departed during the Runaway Scrape and sold his land to Joseph S. Martin.

A few years later, another town was laid out on the west side of Seguin, on land that had been titled by the Alamo defender, Thomas R. Miller and sold in 1840 to Ranger James Campbell in partnership with Arthur Swift and Andrew Neill. This area became part of Seguin within a few years.

At this time the Seguin area was a part of Gonzales County. The Rangers had found this was a good halfway stop between their patrol points. The big oaks and walnut groves along the Walnut Branch Creek (aka Nogales in Spanish), had become a familiar and pleasant location. It had been maintained as a base camp by the rangers since the early founding of the Dewitt Colony.

On August 12, 1838, thirty-three Rangers joined Joseph Martin in laying out the plans for the town. Its original name was Walnut Springs, but was changed just six months later to honor San Jacinto veteran and then Senator, Juan Seguín.

Manuel Flores, veteran of San Jacinto and brother-in-law of Juan Seguin, would establish a ranch just south of Seguin in 1838. It would become a safe-haven for San Antonio families and a staging point for counterattack when Bexar was overrun in 1842 by Santa Anna's forces under Ráfael Vásquez and Adrian Woll. Leading the resistance forces from this location was Texas Ranger "Jack" John Coffee Hays. When duty allowed, "Jack" would be a familiar resident of Seguin. In 1843, Hays would set up a training location or "station" in Seguin, where the classic Ranger character would be born. He would meet Susan Calvert of Seguin, where they later married at the Magnolia Hotel (an early stagecoach stopover) in 1847.

Serving under Hays were two other famous Ranger residents of Seguin: Henry McCulloch and Ben McCulloch. Their home station known as "Hardscramble" still stands and was designated a Texas State Centennial historic site in 1936. Colonel James Clinton Neill, commander of the Alamo, was known to be buried here. The site was also historically marked during the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition.

Seguin became a stopping point and trade center for German immigrants along their route from the ports of Indianola and Galveston to the German settlements of New Braunfels and Fredericksburg. Many Germans heard of the hard times in those Hill Country settlements and instead bought land around Seguin.

Education was important in Seguin. By 1849, it chartered a school and the first schoolhouse was built in 1850. "Guadalupe High School", as it was called, was recognized by the state in 1962, as the oldest continuously used school building in Texas.

Although settled by Rangers and veterans of the Texas revolution, incorporation of the city would not take place until 1853.

Seguin is also home to Dr. John E. Park's Concrete (limecrete). Known as the Concrete City in the 1870s, it was the site of nearly 100 homes constructed of limecrete. Seguin would also be one of the only walled cities in Texas, having a limecrete constructed fence surrounding the town. In 1857, Frederick Olmsted, landscape architect of New York's Central Park, toured Seguin and described the Concrete City as "the prettiest town in Texas." One such home, the Sebastopol House; built in 1856, is a Texas Historical Commission Landmark and is in the National Register of Historic Places due to its unusual limecrete construction and architectural style.

Seguin is the location of the historic Wilson Pottery site; the first business in Texas operated by freed slaves, beginning in 1869.

The oldest railway in Texas, the Galveston, Harrisburg and San Antonio Railroad chartered on February 11, 1850, as the Buffalo Bayou, Brazos and Colorado Railway Company built the first Seguin depot in 1876 en route to San Antonio. It became part of the Southern Pacific Railroad, and now the main southern line of the Union Pacific.

John Ireland was mayor of Seguin in 1858. Elected the 18th Governor of Texas 1883–1887, he was responsible for construction of the Texas State Capitol and creation of the University of Texas at Austin.

In 1912, citizens of Seguin lured a struggling school to the city with cash and 15 acres of land. It grew to a junior college into a four-year college to become today's Texas Lutheran University.

During the 1920s, the county began to enjoy a taste of an oil boom. While the first fields were far east, near Luling, the paperwork of deeds and leases (as well as any resulting lawsuits) passed through the Guadalupe County Court House. Then late in 1929, a well came in opening the Darst Creek Field, only fifteen miles east of town. (The creek had been named for colonist and landowner, Jacob C. Darst. He was one of the original "Old Eighteen," defenders of the Gonzales cannon and then a member of the Gonzales Ranging Company relief force to the Alamo during the siege in 1836.)

With the Darst Field, Seguin became the supply center, and residents were able to rent out rooms to oil field workers for cash even during the worst years of the Great Depression of the 1930s. So Seguin was able to collect taxes when other towns just had to give up. It used the money to match federal grants for what some derided as "make-work" projects. Under the leadership of the popular Mayor, Max Starcke, Seguin was transformed, with a new court house, a new city hall, a fine Art Deco fountain in Central Park, new storm sewers and sidewalks, and a small park along Walnut Branch, with stone walls marking the historic springs and the route of the stage coach as it headed west through town. The biggest achievement was a large park along the Guadalupe River, designed by Robert H.H. Hugman, more famous now as the designer of River Walk in San Antonio. That park featured a handsome Art Deco recreation building (now offices) and swimming pools, a golf course, picnic tables and bar-be-que pits between a scenic river drive and the river, and most of all, at a disused mill the young men of the National Youth Administration put a spectacular curving dam -- sometimes called "the most beautiful waterfall in Texas".

After World War II, entrepreneurs fresh out of the university used electric furnaces to melt scrap into reinforcing bars with a company then called Structural Metals. The mini-mill (now CMC Steel) has been joined by manufacturers including Motorola (now Continental, making electronic auto parts), and Caterpillar, among others.

Attractions

• The Texas Agricultural Education and Heritage Center - Helps kids and others learn the mechanics and history of farming in Central Texas. Sample crops and gardens, barnyard animals and poultry. The "Big Red Barn" displays vintage equipment and tools. A rural village has houses, barns, a one-room schoolhouse, a pharmacy, a church, blacksmith shop, gas station, and other relics from our past. Tours by appointment.

• Sebastopol House Historic Site is the finest surviving 19th-century concrete building west of the Mississippi. Here on the frontier, settlers began experimenting with concrete construction years before the Civil War, and built 100 or so bstructures of "lime-crete", as it was called. A team of slaves built this mansion, mixing local gravel (caliche), sand, lime, and some organic materials, then pouring the mix into wooden forms. When the concrete was solid, they raised the forms and repeated the process. A journalist declared Seguin "The Mother of Concrete Cities". This well-preserved architectural masterpiece, built in 1856 in Greek Revival style, is now a museum offering free tours.

• Heritage Museum - Artifacts from paleo-Indian archeological sites, a display on the Wilson Pottery (the first business operated by ex-slaves in Texas after the Civil War), and keep chests of other historical collections that illustrate area's the rich multi-ethnic heritage.

• Heritage Village - The oldest still-surviving Protestant church in Texas, built in 1849, outlived older churches lost to storms, fires, and progress (torn down to make way for newer, larger ones). A log cabin built by an Irish immigrant, who promptly returned to Ireland to rescue his family from the Great Potato Famine. Then 23 family members lived in (and around) this simple log structure until another room, and then more cabins, could be built. An ornate gingerbread doll house was built for an adopted daughter who came on one of the famous Orphan trains. An adobe house was owned by a German immigrant who knew nothing of adobe. Was it built by workers from San Antonio? Or by some of the hundreds of African slaves here in the years before the Civil War? Records are lost, so you can inspect and speculate for yourself.

• The Fiedler Museum - Displays of geological examples, with various types of rocks from across the state in a small garden on the TLU campus.

• The "World's Largest Pecan" - A five-feet long, two-and-a-half feet wide concrete nut sits in front of the county courthouse. This county is a large producer of pecans and is often attributed the nickname "Pecan Capital of Texas." A new pecan-shaped sculpture, four feet longer than the previous record holder, was unveiled on July 4, 2011 to ensure its place as the "World's Largest." It can be seen at the Texas Agricultural Education and Heritage Center. The original and still photogenic 'pecan' remains at its downtown location.

• Pape's Pecan House and Nutcracker Museum features an awesome display of nutcrackers from Germany, India, and around the world. It also has varieties of the local nuts for sale, both shelled and unshelled, as well as in candies.

• Texas Theatre - Built in the town's oil boom (opened March 1930), and lovingly restored, the building shows an exuberant mix of styles, variants of Art Deco called Zig Zag and Art Moderne. Materials including fancy brickwork, colorful tiles, rich woods and textiles, brass fixtures, even mica for the lampshades. The vertical sign reading "T E X A S" and the lone star at the top are surrounded by chasing lights, a wonderful survivor of spectacular signage from the era before neon took over.

• True Women - Seguin is one of the settings of the 1994 Janice Woods Windle historical novel True Women . The author grew up here, learning the women's side of history from family members. A self-drive tour of sites in the book is available at the Chamber of Commerce or at [4]. The best-selling novel was the basis for the 1997 CBS miniseries adaptation, True Women, starring Dana Delany, Annabeth Gish, and Angelina Jolie.

Nanci Griffith, the Grammy Award-winning singer, guitarist and songwriter, was born in Seguin.

American country music singer Dottsy is from Seguin, and often performs at the Texas Theatre and other occasions.

Parks and outdoors

• Max Starcke Park - Picnic Areas, Pavilions, Playground, Baseball, Volleyball, Golf, Windshield Tourism: "The Most Beautiful Waterfall in Texas", the "Jade-Green Water" of the Guadalupe River
• Seguin Aquatic Center - Wave Pool, Swimming, Party Area
• Seguin Events Complex / Fairgrounds Park - Guadalupe County Fair & PRCA Rodeo (held the second weekend of October), Rodeo Arena, Baseball Field, 14 Volleyball Courts, Meeting Spaces, site of Buck Fever and other events
• Walnut Springs Park - Trails, Hiking, Former Stagecoach Route, Historic Markers
• ZDT Amusement Center - Waterpark, Indoor Games, Rides built in, thru, and around 100-year-old agro-industrial buildings. Grain silos, for example, have become climbing walls - Website [5]
• Seguin Central Park - Statue of Texas Hero Juan N. Seguin, Fountain, Trade Days, Band Concerts, Freedom Fiesta, Car Shows, other events
• Historic Main Street District - Walking/Driving Tours, Architecturally notable buildings from the early 20th century
• Seguin Outdoor Learning Center - Website [6]
• Max Starcke Park Golf Course - 18-hole course along the river and thru a former pecan orchard
• Golf Club of Seguin / Chaparral Golf Course - Website [7]
• The Bandit Golf Course
• Lake Dunlap - Fishing and boating
• Lake Seguin / Seguin Paddling Trail - Canoeing and Kayaking at Max Starcke Park. Website [8]
• Lake McQueeny Recreational Area - "The Water Ski Capital of Texas"
• Lake Nolte - Meadowlake - Boating, Fishing
• Lake Placid - Boating, Fishing, Jet Skiing

State and federal representation

Seguin was represented in the Texas House of Representatives from 1983 to 2010 by the Republican Edmund Kuempel. A native of Austin, businessman Kuempel died in office two days after being unopposed for reelection. John Kuempel, Edmund Kuempel's son, won the special election on December 14 of that year to succeed his father in the District 44 seat in the Texas House. He was reelected in 2012.

Democrat Ruben Hinojosa has represented Guadalupe County in the U.S. House of Representatives as part of Texas' 15th Congressional District, since 2012. One of the "fajita" districts, the 15th runs in a narrow strip from Seguin down to Edinburg and McAllen in the Rio Grande Valley.

Geography

Seguin is located at 29°34′28″N 97°57′55″W (29.574329, -97.965332). This is 35 miles east-by-northeast of downtown San Antonio, on Interstate 10. It is about 50 miles south of Austin on Hwy 123, off Interstate 35.

According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of 19.2 square miles (50 km²), of which 19.0 square miles (49 km²) is land and 0.2 square miles (0.52 km²) (0.89%) is water.

Demographics

As of the census of 2010, there were 25,175 people, up from 22,011 in 2000. There were 8,794 households, and 5,968 families residing in the city. In 2000, the population density was 1,157.2 people per square mile (446.8/km²)., and there were 8,164 housing units at an average density of 429.2 per square mile (165.7/km²). The racial makeup of the city in 2000 was 75.9% White, 8.0% African American, 0.61% Native American, 0.9% Asian, 0.0% Pacific Islander, 13.6% from other races, and 2.6% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 55.4% of the population.

There were 8,794 households out of which 29.3% had their own children under the age of 18 living with them, 43.9% were married couples living together, 17.9% had a female householder with no husband present, and 32.1% were non-families. Individuals made up 27.3% of all households and 13.1% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.68 and the average family size was 3.25.

The population was spread out with 25.4% under the age of 18, 8.3% from 20 to 24, 23.0% from 25 to 44, 23.2% from 45 to 64, and 16.0% who were 65 years of age or older. The median age was 35.3 years. Females were 51.7%, and males were 48.3% of the populations.

In 2000, the median income for a household in the city was $31,618, and the median income for a family was $36,931. Males in 2000 had a median income of $27,007 versus $19,690 for females. The per capita income for the city was $13,740. About 13.2% of families and 17.2% of the population were below the poverty line, including 22.3% of those under age 18 and 13.6% of those age 65 or over.

Government and infrastructure

The main offices of the Guadalupe-Blanco River Authority are located in Seguin. The GBRA manages Canyon Dam, upstream on the Guadalupe, as well as four small dams in the county and other facilities.

The Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) operates the Seguin Parole Office in Seguin.

The United States Postal Service operates the Seguin Post Office and the Seguin Annex in Seguin.

Education

The City of Seguin is served by the Seguin Independent School District.

St. James Catholic School A Historical Marker notes original concrete portion from 1854 makes this the oldest continuously occupied school building in Texas.

Navarro Independent School District Serves students in northern Seguin.

Texas Lutheran University, with about 1,400 students, is affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. It has a diverse student body, with only 20% describing themselves as Lutheran, 27% Hispanic, 10% African-American. TLU was ranked #3 among the Best West Regional universities by the U.S. News & World Reports 2013.

Alamo Colleges - Central Texas Technology Center is located just outside of Seguin.

Christian Academy

Seguin Lifegate Christian School

Notable people

• Winston Hill, former professional football player in the NFL, played for the New York Jets
• Ron Jones, former professional baseball player in the MLB, played for the Philadelphia Phillies

Sister cities

Seguin has three sister cities, as designated by Sister Cities International, Inc (SCI):

• Millicent, South Australia, Australia
• Vechta, Lower Saxony, Germany
• San Nicolás de los Garza, Nuevo León, Mexico

See also

• List of museums in Central Texas

External links

• Guadalupe County Appraisal District
• Official website of the City of Seguin
• Convention and Visitors Bureau
• Seguin Area Chamber of Commerce
• Texas Lutheran University
• Wilson Historical Foundation
• Newspapers and Publications:
  • Seguin Gazette-Enterprise
  • Seguin Daily News