Maverick Ranch, a Hill Country bastion of preservation, conservation & tranquility
By Bebe and Sissy Fenstermaker
Maverick Ranch Notes, our column in this fine Journal of the Borderlands, has run for eight years, relaying the news and latest incidents here in the Texas Hill Country. When we write, ranching, history, wildlife, nature tourism, and art mix together with the daily goings-on of this old place. The Maverick Ranch - Fromme Farm, a designated National Register of Historic Places district, is a very special place. It had and continues to have a colorful history. Besides its history, maintaining its native wildlife and flora are our primary goals. How we came to love it and why we work to preserve it could fill a book or two, but we will try to keep it short.
Maverick Ranch: Altgelts,
Oberts, Mavericks
Our great-grandparents were responsible for getting us into the whole thing. Our great-grandfather, George Madison Maverick, son of Samuel Augustus and Mary Adams Maverick, was born on the coast of Texas in 1845 and spent his childhood in San Antonio . Our great-grandmother, Mary Vance Maverick, was born in Castroville in 1855. They bought the Ranch on January 1, 1907, and the whole family fell in love with it right from the beginning. The first year exploded with building projects. They added a cottage, along with a milking shed and a woodworking shed, and moved the Barn from in front of the house to a better location. Other projects included a big brick-lined tank to provide water by gravity flow, new livestock corrals, and even the road was rerouted so that it measured exactly a mile from gate to headquarters.
The limestone and fachwerk main house, a kitchen house behind it, a small one-room stone schoolhouse (the first school in the area), the original barn, and a log cabin pre-dated the Mavericks. Earlier owners Ernst Hermann and Emma Murck Altgelt built these in the late 1860s and early 70s. Ernst Altgelt founded Comfort, Texas and the King William area in San Antonio , and Emma Altgelt was a journalist who left vivid memoirs of times at the Ranch. She also taught school in the little schoolhouse. The family survived an Indian raid at the Ranch in 1870 during which they stayed up all night making shot for the guns. The Altgelts loved the Ranch, living here for many years. Emma named it Wassenberg after a family place in Germany . Both Altgelts and a son are buried here in a family cemetery.
The second homestead located within the Ranch fenceline belonged to George and Maria Obert. It includes high stone pens and the foundation of their stone house. In the late 1860s, cattle headed northward on trail drives were held overnight in the pens and Mrs. Obert served meals to the drovers. Mr. Obert farmed and raised some livestock and is buried here in the Obert family cemetery. The Creek, flowing near the homestead, fills a beautiful pool with aqua water after a good rain. Named Obert's Pool, it has pink and yellow blooming buckeye and creek fern growing from honeycombed rocks. Vertically scraped rocks show signs of geological faulting. Golden-cheeked warblers and other birds sing in the tall trees overhead.
Fromme Farm
The Fromme Farm adjoins the Ranch on the east. Established in the 1860s by Daniel and Bertha Fromme, it is an example of a self-sufficient German Hill Country farm. Mr. Fromme grew up in the orphanage in New Braunfels (his parents died soon after arrival from Germany ). As a very young man, he drove a freight wagon between Federicksburg and San Antonio . He often stopped at a pretty spring to water his team and camp. After the Civil War he purchased that spring and adjoining land with land script and started farming. Frommes is an architectural gem of small limestone and frame buildings (smokehouse, barn, stable/shed row, root cellar, springhouse, pigsty, chicken house) and tall stone walls, all hand built. Mr. Fromme cleared fields and raised crops and livestock; our mother remembered him working all day long.
Mr. Fromme and George Maverick, neighbors and Confederate veterans, often reminisced about their experiences in the Civil War. The two families shared a vegetable garden down on the Creek. Mama loved Fromme Farm and when it sold in the l950s she and Papa bought it. The Fromme family had owned it for 90 years. Our parents lived here for many years, doing thousands of restoration projects and enjoying the peace and beauty of the place.
Succeeding Maverick
generations
The next Mavericks, our grandmother Rena Maverick Green, and her sisters, Lola, Lucy, and Augusta , continued the family bond with the Maverick Ranch. These four women, each quite different and each certainly remarkable, were united in their concern for the welfare of all people and the belief in every individual's rights. As young women, they were suffragettes, taking their daughters (and even one son) along to demonstrate for the passage of the 19th amendment. Grandma held strategy meetings at the Ranch with Texas suffragettes working for Texas ' ratification of the amendment. They met under an old oak, known as the 19th Amendment Oak to this day. The sisters went on to accomplish many things, each in her preferred field of preservation, art, world peace, and human rights. Throughout their busy lives, the constant and vital work always brought them back to the Ranch for recuperation and peace.
Rena Maverick Green was a great preservationist. She loved Texas history and felt it was important to look and think before rashly demolishing. All her life Grandma worked to show others what there was to see and admire about Texas . With friends, she founded the Conservation Society in San Antonio . She saved buildings and objects from every Texas period and style, not just the fanciest or most colorful. She believed in preserving open land for its own sake. She initiated a public service that later became Legal Aid in San Antonio . She and her sisters were accomplished artists. She published four books of family memoirs and history along with many articles and pamphlets. We remember Grandma as a very fine and creative cook. She married District Judge (later County Judge and State Senator) Robert B. Green in 1897, and by 1907, they had four children. Our mother was the youngest. Bob died suddenly in December 1907, less than a year after the purchase of the Ranch. After the shock of her loss lessened, Grandma brought her children to the Ranch to live for several years. The children remembered those years fondly all of their lives and they added many stories to the Ranch's repertoire.
Our Mother, her siblings, and cousins maintained a solid front where the Ranch was concerned. All loved it, visited it, and stayed as long as they could. They continued their mothers' work, themselves becoming known for preservation, world peace, art, and human rights. All generations of Mavericks have used the Ranch for artist inspiration. Family artwork covers a wall in the Kitchen House. Our aunt, the ceramist Mary Vance Green, spent much time here sketching designs from nature or animals for her future pieces. During this generation's ownership, the Ranch and Frommes were listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The three historic homesteads and the land, fenceline to fenceline, were designated an historic district because it was considered most unusual to find a rural neighborhood preserved intact.
Our time
Along with our cousins, we eventually found ourselves the keepers of this amazing place. Within this inheritance came golden-cheeked warblers and black-capped vireos. The earlier generations' careful, loving stewardship ensured that both endangered birds live and breed here in their native habitat. Having learned early from our elders, we knew it was important to preserve and maintain everything here. Little did we know how valuable that education would prove to be when standing up to today's challenges. We have fought eminent domain a few times. We kept a huge state highway and then utility substations and transmission lines from coming through. We learned not to just complain but to get out and work for the preservation of open space and historic sites. Attitudes change when citizens stand up and demand better solutions.
We raise traditional Texas Longhorn cattle. We researched old bloodlines and decided that Yates and WR are the strongest and most original. Long-lived, intelligent, and thrifty, they produce calves into their high teen years. We tried two other breeds and although the crossbred calves are hardy and larger, we prefer the purebred longhorns. Branding time is interesting around here. One cousin, a doctor, helps us by giving the calves their first inoculations. He was intrigued by the toughness of calf hide on his first jab. Of course, our Maverick ancestor Samuel did not brand his cattle, so we maintain a small moral dilemma at branding time.
We are starting nature and heritage tourism, along with the cow business. We have joined the Heart of Texas Nature Trail recently begun by Texas Parks and Wildlife. Their beautiful new map includes us as number 81 on the Cibolo Loop. A wildlife-watching business requires first class habitat and endangered birds require careful monitoring. We are located where the Balcones escarpment and south Texas brush country meet, and the varied terrain provides habitat for a good diversity of species. We want visitors to enjoy being here, and we work hard to maintain that diversity and habitat so there will be plenty to see. Wildlife watching is not new to the Maverick Ranch - Fromme Farm; the San Antonio Audubon Society has bird-watched here for 50 years. One member kept a bird list that has proven to be of incalculable value. Along with updating and adding to that bird list, we maintain plant and animal lists. We have about 250 species of plants identified so far. The Maverick Ranch was the first place in Bexar County where the rare Hill Country Wild Mercury plant was identified. Rattlesnakes, rat, bull, and coral snakes, spiny and Texas alligator lizards, coyotes, foxes, bobcats, armadillos, jackrabbits, rock squirrels, opossums, skunks, owls, hawks, ravens, and many more fill the lists.
Two years ago, collaborating with U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, we began a black-capped vireo habitat enhancement project. We cut all second-growth cedar on 40 acres and dropped many live oak trees in order to stimulate regrowth oak. When this reaches "door handle" height it will be ideal vireo nesting habitat. We have recently decided to add more acres to the project and to revisit the original part with a chainsaw to take down more oaks. Doing this was startling at first, but now that there are such encouraging results, we like having fewer oaks and realize that the new openness was how the land originally looked.
The huge variety of native plants coming up in the project area has been a bonanza. In addition, we are planting in the cleared fields in order to create motts of trees and shrubs for black-capped vireos. We piled cut cedar into rings to protect the young plants from deer and cattle. After planting, we drag in more cedar to close the entrances. The first year we gathered an acorn crop from our own shin and live oaks and planted them directly into the rings. After losing a good part of that crop, we planted in gallon pots and have had more success. We plant out the little oaks, along with other trees and shrubs, when they get a good root system started. We enjoy deciding what goes into each ring, collecting it, and guessing how it will look in the future. It makes us notice all the plant combinations that occur in nature.
Guzzlers are next on our work list for the wildlife. These are rainwater and dew-collection devices. Mainly a roof and a storage tank, they collect moisture and create new watering holes. We plan to put them all over the Ranch and Frommes. They will make good wildlife watching sites.
We move right on with our work, projects, and interests. Much of our inspiration for artwork and writing comes from the Ranch and Frommes. We live with hundreds of dogs, cats, chickens, geese, guineas, peacocks, horses, cattle, and . . . Genevieve the doe. Genevieve and her family have been well covered in our articles and Sissy says, "Enough said." Typical Mavericks, not one animal is like another; each has a strong character and is not shy about showing it. The Ranch has its own Maverick brand and even has its own paint colors, a certain green and a blue begun long ago by earlier Mavericks. In the 1950s, those colors moved to a new level when outdoor sign paint began to be used. Our uncle said it would last longer than anything else on the market. Right he was; that screaming yellow mustard, hard green, barn red, and tough blue lasted for 40 years. At a friend's insistence, we have changed those tones a bit but the color combinations are still the same.
Through our eyes, the Ranch and Frommes are always special, if not downright beautiful each moment. Times can be difficult, such as the Christmas we had to ferry our friends in because the new road surface had become a caliche mudslide. There was the interesting year when pipes froze and broke and there were 50 people for Christmas Dinner. While everyday we see something new, on the other hand we sense the experiences of the past. When we look, we see what is now and what has been, all together at the same time. Some visitors see only what is now while others seem to take it as we do. For us, Maverick Ranch - Fromme Farm is all the experiences of the years, every life, memory, and facet of home at once.
