The Trailist: South Side’s historic Trueheart Ranch has a mile-long trail, plans for much more

Bexar County residents gained access to two new pieces of public land last weekend, including a park on a historic ranch on the South Side that will one day offer camping and river access.

The San Antonio River Authority opened Trueheart Ranch on Sept. 23, along with another 74-acre property on the Medina River southwest of San Antonio. Kristen Hansen, the authority’s deputy director for parks and recreation, said in a statement that “we invite the community to come explore and experience the natural beauty of these remarkable additions to our city.”

I found the ranch intriguing on my visit last Wednesday. Even with the signs and other improvements installed by the river authority before its public opening, the long-shuttered farmhouse, the abandoned ranch equipment and the overgrown pastures and orchards create a bit of a spooky vibe. 

The parking lot near the entrance surrounds the old farmhouse, a two-story structure built in the mid-1800s. The land is named after James L. Trueheart, a Virginia-born settler who married Petra de la Garza, the daughter of large Mexican landholder José Antonio de la Garza. The land later passed to a hunting and fishing association, then a family of pecan farmers and ranchers, a water utility, and a solar power company before the San Antonio River Authority bought it in 2015.  

Most of the 351-acre property remains closed to the public, or at least it was when I visited. The ranch roads that lead to the San Antonio River had locked gates blocking them. However, the authority’s website speaks of big plans for the park, including river access points, fishing, multiple campgrounds, a picnic area, an equestrian trail, RV parking, bird watching stations, and a restoration of the Blackland Prairie habitat that would have once been found at the site. See the river authority’s website for more details on the park’s master plan. 

Visitors are currently allowed to walk right up to the farmhouse, a white building that “was said to be the first two-story rock house built on a Texas ranch,” according to the San Antonio Conservation Society. Nearby, visitors can also see a small shack labeled “scale house,” along with metal gates and corrals once used for livestock. 

The river authority has also opened a path that circumnavigates a former pecan orchard, a roughly mile-long route they named the Acequia Trail. It includes a path cutting through the circle from northeast to southwest.

I started at a point downhill from the farmhouse, where pipes emerge from underground and lead to an empty concrete basin drained by a couple concrete ditches. Nearby stood a wooden building, half leaning over, surrounded with an orange barrier. Inside, I could see an old, white stove and the remnants of bedding left on the floor. 

The trailhead continues past an open gate with a metal emblem of a longhorn head. On the ground nearby stood a stone marker that read: “Pecans Planted 1920-22, High Water Mark Sept. 27 — 46, C.A. Goeth & Sons.” 

It felt like a strange coincidence to be standing there on the exact date of this flood, 77 years later. The downpour killed four people and was known as the most severe flood in the city’s history at the time, surpassing the prior record flood of 1921. I later found this 1948 report from the U.S. Geological Survey that said that the flooding was mainly concentrated on the West Side Creeks. The San Antonio River “did little damage through the city” because of the Olmos Dam, built in the mid-1920s to protect wealthier downtown areas from flooding.

Of the part of the river that includes Trueheart Ranch, the report stated that “although extensive flooding occurred downstream of the city, damages were relatively light as the flood plain is not well developed.” Still, the rising water clearly made enough of an impact on the Goeth family for them to mark the high water point in stone on their property.

Though San Antonio has experienced many severe deluges since the flood of 1946, lack of water appears to have taken a greater toll on the pecan orchard since their planting a century ago. Only a few dead or struggling pecans remained, their bare branches reaching far above the mesquites and other small trees that have sprouted around them. On the north side of the Acequia Trail near one of the two trailheads, I found a couple girthy pecans that still looked healthy.

The Goeth family bought the land in 1913 from the San Antonio Hunting and Fishing Association, which created the nearby duck sanctuary called Blue Wing Lake, according to a historical sign at the park. They cobbled together parcels from nearby properties until they had built up the acreage nearly to the original 800 acres that de la Garza deeded to his daughter when she married Trueheart in 1848. Fred Goeth and his wife even lived in the house from 1936 until he died in 1962.

After that, the property changed hands multiple times, including to the now-defunct utility Bexar Metropolitan Water District. San Antonio-based OCI Solar Power owned it for three years, building its 573-megawatt Alamo 1 solar plant on more than 5,000 acres across Blue Wing Road from the Trueheart property.

The land has clearly seen many uses over the years, and its life as a park is only beginning. I’m excited to see what ends up happening with the property and what new trail miles it might offer as the park continues to be developed.