San Saba County, Texas
| San Saba County, Texas | |
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The San Saba County Courthouse in San Saba with emblem "From the People to the People."
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 Location in the U.S. state of Texas |
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 Texas's location in the U.S. |
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| Founded | 1856 |
| Named for | San Saba River |
| Seat | San Saba |
| Largest town | San Saba |
| Area | |
| • Total | 1,138 sq mi (2,947 km2) |
| • Land | 1,135 sq mi (2,940 km2) |
| • Water | 3.1 sq mi (8 km2), 0.3% |
| Population | |
| • (2010) | 6,131 |
| • Density | 5.4/sq mi (2/km²) |
| Congressional district | 11th |
| Time zone | Central: UTC-6/-5 |
| Website | www |
San Saba County is a county located on the Edwards Plateau in western Central Texas. As of the 2010 census, its population was 6,131. Its county seat is San Saba. The county is named after the San Saba River, which flows through the county.
United Confederate Veterans organized a chapter known as the "William P. Rogers Camp" in San Saba County after the death in 1889 of Confederate President Jefferson Davis. Rogers, a hero of the Battle of Corinth in Mississippi, was a native of Georgia. He did not live in San Saba, but his daughter, Fannie, married one of Rogers' officers, George Harris, who moved there in 1880. A former county judge, Harris served as a commander of Rogers Camp, named for his father-in-law. The veterans' organization lasted until the early 1930s.
During the 1880s, a vigilante mob, organized like a fraternal lodge, killed a number of San Saba County settlers. In 1896, the Texas Rangers began an investigation. Uluth M. Sanderson, editor of the San Saba County News, ran editorials against the mob. Ultimately, the mob was broken by the Ranger Captain Bill McDonald and District Attorney W.C. Linder. Many of the mob executions committed throughout Texas in the time following the Civil War were racially motivated and often committed by members of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), which formed in Shelby County, Texas. Most of the people killed by vigilante mobs in the five years after the war were "suspected slave rebels and white abolitionists". Although the KKK in Texas was less active by the 1870s, lives continued to be taken each year. In 1885, for the state of Texas, "...an estimated twenty-two mobs lynched forty-three people, including nineteen blacks and twenty-four whites, one of whom was female". "The San Saba County lynchers, the deadliest of the lot, claimed some twenty-five victims between 1880 and 1896. Vigilante lynching died out in the 1890s, but other varieties of mobs continued."
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Wikipedia