When Weather Writes Kerr County History

Kerrville from the north, looking down the river valley, 2020

Picture this: You're standing at an invisible line that runs right through the heart of Texas. To your east, rain falls generously, nourishing thick forests and fertile fields. To your west, the sky hoards its moisture, creating a land where every drop is precious. You can't see this line, but it has shaped centuries of human drama, conflict, and survival. 

Welcome to the 98th meridian—a boundary that doesn't appear on most maps but has written more Texas history than any treaty or battle.

Let me be clear about what kind of weather I'm talking about. This isn't about the sudden thunderstorm that forced little Lulu's seventh birthday party indoors, turning her parents' living room into a chaos of sugar-fueled seven-year-olds. Though Lulu's parents might argue that was a historical catastrophe, and they'd certainly feel the weight of changed circumstances when thirty kids start ricocheting off their furniture. This isn't even about those dramatic weather moments we read about in textbooks—the storms that changed famous battles, or the icebergs that claimed legendary ships.

No, I'm talking about something far more subtle and infinitely more powerful: the everyday rhythm of seasons, the predictable dance of clouds and sunshine, the quiet presence or absence of morning dew. Plain old, boring weather that whispers its influence across generations.

My journey into this weather-history connection began with Walter Prescott Webb's masterwork, "The Texas Rangers." Why read about Rangers in dusty Kerr County? Because our soil tells their story. Many local men served as Texas Rangers. Joseph Tivy roamed these hills as a Ranger. So did Charles Schreiner. Walk through Center Point Cemetery and you'll find more than thirty former Texas Rangers resting there, including Andrew Jackson Sowell, who traded his badge for a historian's pen. Understanding the Rangers meant understanding the land that forged them—our land.

Webb's opening pages delivered an observation that started me thinking. I'd heard of his 98th meridian theory before: east of that line, plantations thrived on abundant rainfall and enslaved labor; west of it, the rain vanished, and with it, the plantation economy. This geographic reality shaped Texas differently than other Southern states, creating a complex legacy that rainfall helped write. While this doesn't erase the wrongs of slavery from our state's (or our county’s) history, it does reveal how something as simple as precipitation patterns influenced the entire trajectory of our region.

Webb's insight went deeper than antebellum economics. This dividing line along the 98th meridian had shaped Kerr County's history long before the Civil War, long before our county even existed, stretching back beyond written records into the mists of prehistory.

Here in Kerr County, we live closer to the 99th meridian than the 98th. We're solidly in what Webb called the Western Plains—drier, harsher, more demanding than the counties to our east. As Webb described it, "The 98th meridian separates the Eastern Woodland from the Western Plains; it separates East Texas from West Texas." He painted a picture of traveling up the Colorado River from its mouth to its source, moving east to west through "heavily timbered and well-watered country," across level prairie, and finally into the high plains.

Take the drive from Houston to Kerrville along Interstate 10 and you'll watch this transformation unfold before your eyes. Dense, humid forests gradually give way to rolling hills, then to our familiar rocky terrain. Continue west toward Fort Stockton, and those hills surrender to the semi-arid expanse that stretches toward New Mexico. Each landscape demanded different ways of living, different ways of surviving.

When Mexico's grip on Texas was loosening in the 1830s and 1840s, Native American tribes on either side of this invisible divide had evolved into completely different societies—all because of weather patterns. The tribes living in the eastern part of the state enjoyed reliable rainfall that supported agriculture. They built permanent villages, cultivated crops, and many welcomed cooperation with newcomers.

But west of the line, our ancestors—both Native American and settlers from the rest of the world—faced a harsher reality. Resources were scarce, competition fierce. Tribes lived nomadically, following game and seasonal water sources across vast territories. Conflict wasn't just common; it was often necessary for survival. The very landscape bred warriors, not farmers. There was constant tension between different groups, and cooperation with settlers was rare. The people of the plains had learned that in a land where the sky was stingy with its gifts, you fought for what you needed.

When early Kerr County settlers arrived, they entered this western world—a place where the sky's stinginess with rain had created cultures defined by mobility, toughness, and territorial vigilance. How much of the difference between these two worlds came down to weather? Probably more than we imagine.

The peaceful agricultural tribes of East Texas and the fierce nomadic peoples of our region weren't just making different cultural choices. They were responding to fundamentally different environments, shaped by fundamentally different rainfall patterns. The weather didn't just influence their daily routines—it molded their ways of life, their social structures, their relationships with outsiders, their very understanding of how to survive in the world.

Standing in modern Kerrville, watching our own cycles of drought and occasional rain abundance, we're witnessing the same forces that shaped centuries of human drama. The sky above us carries the memory of every culture that has called this place home, every conflict fought over scarce resources, every adaptation made to survive in a beautiful but demanding land. Sometimes history falls like rain—sudden, dramatic, impossible to ignore. But more often, it works like the weather itself: quietly, persistently, shaping everything it touches until the landscape of human experience is forever changed.

Until next week, all the best.

Joe Herring Jr. is a Kerrville native who remembers times when months would pass between rainfalls—and now understands how those dry spells helped write the story of where we live. This column originally appeared in the Kerr County Lead May 29, 2025.

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