Menard, established in 1858 along the San Saba River, grew modestly as a farming and ranching center in a pecan-fringed valley on the Edwards Plateau, but the area’s history reaches back through hundreds of generations of Native peoples and an eighteenth-century Spanish colony centered on the Real Presidio de San Saba and Mission Santa Cruz de San Saba, where Franciscan priests sought to convert Lipan Apaches and support a settled community with soldiers, a dam, and an acequia that still functions in downtown Menard as the Ditch Walk; after priests were killed and the mission burned in 1758, the presidio was abandoned a little more than a decade later, yet stories of Spanish gold and Apache silver continued to draw prospectors in the 1800’s, including Jim Bowie, while later local memory also recalled figures such as Martha Weonah and Judge Julius Romulus Norton. Catholic worship in Menard was infrequent until Father Baudrillard visited in 1898 to discuss building a church on land donated in 1870 by J.J. Callan, and Sacred Heart Church, completed in 1899 from hand-quarried limestone hauled from four to five miles northeast of town with much donated labor, became the oldest organized Catholic church in the San Angelo diocese; it remained a mission church for 40 years, served first by priests from San Angelo and Mason, then from 1905 by the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, with Father Fred Fassbender followed in 1919 by Father V.X. Ganon, who also helped build a frame school in North Menard staffed for about four years by the Sisters of Mercy from Stanton, until the old church was discontinued in 1955 after becoming too small for the growing congregation.