Tilden

Tilden, the county seat of McMullen County, is at the intersection of State highways 16 and 72 in the north central part of the county. The town was probably named for Samuel J. (Whispering Sammy) Tilden, the unsuccessful Democratic presidential candidate in the election of 1876. It was one of the first two settlements in McMullen County when it was founded in 1858 at the mouth of Leoncita Creek on the Frio River. The settlement was called Rio Frio and had eight to ten crude dwellings that housed about thirty people by the fall of that year. Soon afterward the townspeople built a road connecting their settlement to the old San Antonio-Laredo road, which lay to the west. In the early 1860s the town grew slowly. In 1862 Levi J. Edwards built its first general store, and shortly after he added a saloon. About that time, too, the town built its first school. The settlement acted as a home-guard post for the Twenty-ninth Brigade of the Texas Confederate Militia during the Civil War