People have always wanted to come to Kingsland. Archaeological evidence shows that for thousands of years before Martin King bequeathed his name to the scenic valley, Indians had regularly visited the banks of the Llano and Colorado Rivers. A Spanish explorer named Bernardo de Miranda led a party of 23 treasure-hunters down the Llano River to “Kingsland” in 1756, but for more than a century thereafter the rugged hills and fierce inhabitants kept all but the most adventurous from even seeing, let alone settling, this remarkable place “where rivers flow and bluebonnets grow.”

The Texas Hill Country experienced a flood of pioneers in the 1850s and again, after the Civil War, in the 1870s. Small settlements sprang up quite close to the junction of the two rivers, including Hoover’s Valley to the east and Packsaddle (also called Gainesville) to the west. According to Joseph Carroll McConnell’s book, The West Texas Frontier, a Methodist preacher named George Wolf lived about a mile west of the Colorado on the Llano River during the 1860s. Wolf’s teenage sons, Hiram and Washington, were attacked by Indians while they were out hunting wild hogs in what is now downtown Kingsland; Hiram was killed, and Washington was held prisoner for quite some time before a posse was able to rescue him. After the famous battle with an Apache raiding party on Packsaddle Mountain in 1873, there were no major Indian depredations, but it was 1879 before the beautiful valley was claimed.

In her book, “Families of Early Kingsland,” Muriel Barnett Jackson tells how Civil War veteran Martin Daniel King and his wife, Nancy Jane (Trussell) left Mississippi for Texas after the war with their three children and a herd of cattle. They eventually settled in Hoover’s Valley, but “when he spied the beautiful land in the cove where the Llano River meets the Colorado, he dreamed of establishing a town there.

King and his brother-in-law, James Trussell, for ...

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