Sabinal

Sabinal, originally known as Hammer's Station, is on U.S. Highway 90 and the Southern Pacific Railroad, twenty miles northeast of Uvalde in east central Uvalde County. The first settler at the site was Thomas B. Hammer, who established a stage stop there on the east bank of the Sabinal River in 1854. Other early settlers were Louis Peter, Peter Rheiner (future father-in-law of Vice President John Nance Garner qv ), John Kenedy, and George Johnson. A post office was opened at the stage stop on October 19, 1854, with Hammer as postmaster. A soldier by the name of Austerman, who arrived at Hammer's Station in the late 1850s en route from Del Rio to Castroville, recalled a community hungry for news from the outside world. He also remembered seeing long trains of freight wagons on the road by Hammer's Station carrying supplies to settlers and soldiers on the far western frontier.