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Image Information - People
- John Ignacio Maximillian, Jr.1782 - 1866
- Copyright holder
- Family Marker
- Ralph Ramos, State Editor. Newspaper: Beaumont Enterprise. (Geneva, Sabine County, Texas) 15 Nov 1972.
- 6-B Beaumont Enterprise, Wednesday, November 15, 1972
- Tiny Geneva To Take Place In History
- By Ralph Ramos, State Editor
- GENEVA – The oldest continuously occupied site in East Texas is receiving a historical recognition – an official Texas Historical Marker is to be rected at Geneva within the next few weeks.
- Historian Mrs. Edna White reports the marker has already arrived and the ceremony will probably come before December 1st.
- The marker will go up near the post office at Geneva, which is in Sabine County east of Milam. It does not designate an exact site, rather the marker states: “In this vicinity was historic Spanish Rancho called El Lobanillo.
- El Lobanillo was the pueblo of Gil Y’Barbo and was established before the American Revolution. The marker reminds of this historical fact; …where his (Y’Barbo’s) mother and other refugees remained when Spain evacuated colonists from Western Louisiana and East Texas in 1773.”
- The site was granted in 1794 to Juan Ignacio Pifermo and was inherited in the early 1800s by John Maximillian.
- Among a handful of descendents of Maximillian is Pineland’s Carl C. Maxey. He served as superintendent of Bronson schools for 17 years.
- Maxey (whose name was legally abbreviated from the original Maximillian) recounts some of his family’s background plus some of that of El Lobanillo.
- His ancestor, John Maximillian, came to Sabine county while in his teens, arriving with his uncle, Juan Ignacio Pifermo, and his wife who was a sister of the mother of John Maximillian. She was Larendaudiere (French).
- Their arrival in East Texas is set in the year 1794 when Pifermo was granted four leagues of land between the Borrega and Lobanillo creeks which were astraddle the Camino Real.
- The hacienda, Maxey says, was located in the vicinity of present-day Geneva and was said to be the same as the old Y’Barbo hacienda in 1773.
- Maxey says the location “gave my great-grandfather a ringside seat in the unfolding panorama of Texas history.”
- El Lobanillo temporarily pastured the droves of wild horses rounded up on West Texas plains then driven to the East Texas frontier for the profitable and busy contraband trade with the Indians, French and U. S. frontier settlers east of the Sabine River.
- The trade was made profitable by the upswing of cotton culture in the United States and the need for plough horses.
- El Lobanillo was a refuge against the robbers who inhabited the “neutral strip”. Because of this continual threat to the contraband trade deliveries of horses across the strip would be made only a few at a time.
- Maxey says that after his ancestor Maximillian inherited the rancho he and his wife kept a kind of way side inn for travelers along the “Camino Real”. They were to keep the latch string out for almost a half century.
- Mrs. White’s research turns up historical fact. El Lobanillo was a way side inn as early as 1767 when Father Jose de Solis recorded he had spent a night there on a tour of early Texas missions. The rancho was then owned by Gil Y’Barbo.
- Maximillian sold his land almost all of it encroached upon, to W. C. Duffield for about $4, 000. Duffield later sold to Walt and Prudence Strother.
- By this time, Mrs. White reports, the little Spanish pueblo became known as Geneva. It was home to many prominent East Texans, among them were: Capt. William Scurlock, who fought at San Jacinto; Capt. Randolph Hankla, John Horton, C. Crenstaw, Moses and Hanna Hill, all of whom came to Texas from South Carolina; Samuel McMahon was from Tennessee and Robert Gellately from Ireland.
- El Lobanillo was occupied through the Spanish Evacuation of 1773 and through the Magee-Gutierrez and other filibustering expeditions.
- By 1900 Geneva had an independent school district, it was Sabine county’s first. It offered the first school busing program, a horse-drawn covered wagon.
- El Lobanillo’s exact location awaits some future archaeological study but by Mrs. White’s study of old deeds the old Y’Barbo-Pifermo-Maximillian Sr., hacienda was right inside the present town limits of Geneva on present State Highway 21.
- The date for unveiling of that historical marker is soon to be determined and announced.
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