Helotes

Helotes is located approximately twenty miles northwest of downtown San Antonio on State Highway 16 in northwestern Bexar County. The town was settled in the 1850s by immigrants primarily from Germany and Mexico. The pioneer whose land encompassed what is now known as Old Town Helotes was Scottish immigrant and surgeon Dr. George F. Marnoch, who purchased the property in 1858 and built a two-and-a-half-story limestone house in 1859; the house was awarded a Texas Historic Landmark designation in 2010. His eldest son, Gabriel Wilson Marnoch, was a well-known naturalist who discovered two reptilian and two amphibian species in the Helotes hills.

The Spanish terms elotes and olotes, Americanized to Helotes, which means corn on the cob, has been used for the area since the early 1700s, when it was mentioned in a Spanish report to the governor of the region, describing the area where Apaches scalped a Spaniard who had been looking for stray horses. How the name was derived is unknown; however, it is believed that Lipans had cultivated corn along the creek for centuries before frequent raids of Comanche Indians made such agricultural activities impossible.