Frio River

About

Frio River, Texas — 1849 German Settlement, Concan. Long before any survey crew reached it, the Frio River canyon was contested territory between the Lipan Apache and Comanche peoples. The river's reliable cold springs made the canyon a prized summer refuge in the semi-arid Hill Country, and Spanish missionaries established short-lived outposts along the Frio during the 18th century. That Spanish presence traces back to 1689, when Alonso De León crossed the stream and recorded it as the Rio Sarco — a name later identified with the Frio.

The river proper begins at the juncture of the East, West, and Dry Frio near 29°44' north and 99°45' west. From that point it runs southeast for some 200 miles, cutting through limestone canyons and broad valleys before reaching the Nueces River. The watershed drains 1,890 square miles, spanning from its headwaters in Real County to its confluence in Live Oak County. The Frio Canyon in Real County lends the river its regional identity, and in the 19th century that identity became bound up with settlement.

Between 1849 and 1852, Frio Canyon served as a settlement area for the Adelsverein — the German Emigration Company — colonists. In 1849 the Frenchman Henri Castro, appointed empresario under the Republic of Texas, founded Castroville on the Medina River about 30 miles from the Frio, the first major German settlement in Texas. From the 1880s through the 1910s, German and Polish immigrants settled extensively along the river, planting the towns and farms that still line its banks near Concan.

The river's forests drew industry as well. From the 1830s through the 1920s, the Frio watershed was logged to support the regional timber industry and railroad expansion, with local sawmills, logging drives, and downstream lumber operations doing the work. The exhaustion of old-growth stands around 1910, the start of state forestry conservation in 1915, and the establishment of state forests in the 1930s ended large-scale cutting. Hydrological study kept pace: the first USGS surveys of the Frio came in the 1870s, followed by gauging stations and, in later decades, state streamflow and water-quality assessments.

The modern Frio took shape in the 1930s. Garner State Park, built by the Civilian Conservation Corps, opened on the river in 1941 and became one of the most beloved state parks in Texas, its nightly summer dances at the park pavilion a Hill Country tradition. Conservation continued into the 21st century: the 1935 Frio State Park, originally 254 acres, was restored between 1991 and 2015, and in 2015 the Texas Parks and Wildlife Foundation acquired the 9,200-acre Ghost Hawk Ranch. Today the Frio is one of the most popular tubing rivers in Texas, its recreation concentrated in three stretches — the cypress-lined 15-mile run from Leakey to Garner State Park, the 10-mile family float from Garner to Concan, and the wider, warmer 30-mile lower river from Concan to Uvalde. Its power is not only gentle: the 2019 flood, the largest on record, peaked at 240,000 cfs and flooded the Sabinal River alongside it.