Pedernales Falls State Park is here because of C.A. and Harriett Wheatley’s desire to assure that their beloved ranch would enhance the lives of future generations, as it had done for their own lives. There is something about the human mind and spirit that needs places like this, where tranquility and peace pervade, to help us all escape and rejuvenate—if only for a brief time. As the American naturalist and essayist John Burroughs wrote, “I come here to find myself, it is so easy to get lost in the world.”
Bill McDaniel Park Superintendent, 1990 to 2018
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Click for more history of Pedernales Falls
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Volunteers do not necessarily have the time;
they just have the heart.
Our Mission
The Friends of Pedernales Falls State Park is dedicated to the protection, preservation and enhancement of the Park. The Friends Group serves as a supportive entity to complement the goals and mission of Pedernales Falls State Park and the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department.
EXCERPTS FROM:
Farmers, Ranchers, The Land and The Falls:
A history of the Pedernales Falls Area 1950-1970
by John Leffler
When the State of Texas purchased the Circle Bar Ranch from Harriet Wheatley in March 1970 and created Pedernales Falls State Park, the land was described by the press and park officials alike as a pristine, undisturbed “wilderness.” But while the new park contained areas of rare, even spectacular beauty, people have been living in the vicinity of Pedernales Falls for 10,000 years, and since the 1870s much of the land and vegetation in the area has been shaped and reshaped by farming and ranching. Between 1870 and the early 1880s at least six and perhaps eight or nine separate farms and ranches were established in what is now Pedernales Falls State Park, and a small community grew. Roads, a school and a cemetery emerged, and church services were held for the forty or so men, women and children who lived there. The area’s schoolhouse, the local church services and graveyard, the baseball games played on Schoolhouse Flats and the emerging network of roads all show that the settlers had created an interconnected community. By the mid-1890s that little community had been uprooted by death, drought and economic hardships. The farming and ranching methods used by the early settlers, though, had already set into motion significant ecological changes. These continued after 1900, when John B. Wenmohs, a prominent Blanco County rancher, bought most of what is now the park and devoted the land to raising livestock. Charles and Harriet Wheatley bought the land in 1937 and attempted to preserve it in its “natural state,” but continued ranching activity, and the Wheatley’s work to attract wildlife to the area also altered the land in significant ways. Visitors to Pedernales Falls State Park today are impressed by the area’s quiet isolation and beautiful vistas, but now they can only dimly glimpse the original landscape, and they might completely overlook the many men, women and children who have lived, worked and died there.
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People have lived in or traveled through what is now Blanco County, including the Pedernales Falls area, for about 10,000 years. Projectile points dating to the Paleoindian period (9,500 years B.C. to 7,000 B.C.) have been found in the Pedernales Falls area, along with many artifacts produced and used by native people during the Archaic and Prehistoric periods.2 By the 16th century, when the Spanish first entered Texas, Lipan Apaches roamed the region. Spanish explorers and missionaries slowly became familiar with the general area, and were using the name “Pedernales”—from Spanish for the flint rock found in the river’s bed—by the 1700s.