Spring Lake: One of North America's Oldest Inhabited Places

The springs that feed Spring Lake in San Marcos have been drawing people to this spot for at least twelve thousand years, making it one of the longest continuously inhabited places in North America. The San Marcos Springs push an average of roughly one hundred twenty million gallons of water a day up through the limestone floor of the Edwards Plateau, constant in temperature and volume through drought and flood.

In nineteen twenty-six a developer named A. B. Rogers bought the land, and his son Paul built a resort hotel on the lake two years later. By the nineteen fifties it had evolved into Aquarena Springs, a tourist attraction famous for its glass-bottom boat tours, underwater theatrical shows, and a performing pig named Ralph. Southwest Texas State University, now Texas State University, purchased the property in nineteen ninety-four and gradually converted it from amusement park to research center. The glass-bottom boats still run. The Meadows Center now studies the same water that ancient people camped beside thousands of years before anyone thought to call it a resource.