Page 23 - 2025 Comfort Chamber Membership Directory

priest from the cathedral in San Antonio traveled to this area occasionally to provide services to those people who wanted them. A priest was assigned to Boerne in 1860, but because of local sentiment, he built his church on a hill outside the platted town. As more people moved into the area, however, more churches were established. A Methodist congregation was organized in the mid-1870’s, an Episcopal church in 1881, and a Lutheran church in 1891. In the early 1980’s the county’s fteen churches had an estimated combined membership of 5,514, Catholic, Southern Baptist, Lutheran, and Methodist were the largest denominations.
The major issue at the time of the county’s formation was the Civil War. Kerr County, which in 1861 encompassed most of Kendall County, passed the ordinance of secession by a vote of 76 to 57, however, the majority of voters in Kerr County’s Precinct 2, the area that became Kendall County, opposed secession 53 to 34. The level of Unionist sentiment in the region was due in large part to the number of German immigrants, most of whom opposed both slavery and secession. A large group of area Unionists fought for the Union at the Nueces Battle/Massacre in August of 1862. The slain were eventually buried in a common grave
at Comfort after the war, and Treue der Union Monument (Loyalty to the Union), the oldest in Texas, was dedicated in August of 1866. County residents supported Unionist Edmund J. Davis in his 1869 gubernatorial campaign, but his bid for reelection in 1873 was not successful. In presidential politics county voters preferred Republican and independent candidates in all but two elections between 1872 and 1992, the exceptions being Teddy Roosevelt, who headed the progressive Bull Moose party in 1912, and Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932.
Like most areas in the South, Kendall County su ered considerable economic hardship immediately following the Civil War and throughout the Reconstruction period. Between 1864 and 1866 the county as a whole experienced a 52% loss in property tax receipts. Because few residents had practiced slavery, only 15 percent of this property loss was in slaves, most of the loss came from declines in total farm acreage, farm value and livestock value, each of which fell 20 to 30%. The county began to show signs of recovery by 1880. The overall population rose from 1,536 in 1870 to 2,763 in 1880, and the 1880 census reported 419 farms in the county, up from 197 ten years earlier. The amount of improved land rose from 3, 617 acres in 1870 to 22,452 acres in 1880. Field crops such as corn, wheat, oats, and cotton took up a third of the improved land, while livestock dominated the rest. Sheep ranching, which had been introduced to the area by George W. Kendall in the 1850’s, had become the county’s principal industry. The 1870 census reported the county as having 4,293 sheep and producing 8,781 pounds of wool, in 1880 the county’s 16,259 sheep produced more than 65,200 pounds of wool.
The completion to San Antonio of the Galveston, Harrisburg and San Antonio Railway in 1877 made outside markets more accessible to Kendall County residents, and freight services thrived, hauling local farm produce, wool, and lumber. Transportation became easier still in 1887, when the San Antonio and Aransas Pass Railway reached Comfort. In 1914 the Fredericksburg and Northern Railway connected Fredericksburg with the San Antonio and Aransas Pass track just east of Comfort. The Welfare, Waring, and
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