Pedernales

Pedernales was on State Highway 16 and the Pedernales River, seven miles southwest of Fredericksburg in southern Gillespie County. It was settled in the late 1840s by German immigrants, among whom were Karl Friedrich Hermann Lungkwitz and Friedrich Richard Petri. In the 1850s children from Pedernales attended school with children from the Live Oak district, but by the late 1860s Pedernales had a school of its own, two stores, and a gin. In 1945 the Pedernales school closed, and students began attending classes at the Wrede school, three or four miles closer to Fredericksburg; the Pedernales school was officially consolidated with the Wrede district in 1949. By 1990 little remained of the community besides the school building, which had been renovated in the early 1980s and was used as a private home.