History of the Rocking MJ Ranch

While we can only imagine what the Apaches and later the Comanches may have done on the Rocking MJ -- for most of its history in the Jonas family, the Rocking MJ was used as grazing land for Hereford cattle and a hard-scrabble home for Angora, and later, Spanish and Boer goats.

The ranch was also once home to a cedar chopper family who “sharecropped” cedar as rent to live on the Rocking MJ. In fact, some of the posts that serve as the porch posts for the front and back porches of the bed and breakfast came from trees that surrounded the dirt-floor ‘lean to” home of the cedar chopper family.

The most dynamic feature of the Rocking MJs 200 acres of scrub live oaks, cedar lined ravines and steppe-like limestone and caliche uplifts is 1000-foot Mount Baldy (or Old Baldy), about ½ mile from the bed and breakfast. Mount Baldy provides spectacular views of Canyon Lake and the surrounding Hill Country.

The original surveys refer to Mount Baldy as Mount Ampora from the Maria Ampora Survey of the region. Later, the German settlers in the area called Baldy, “Der Spitzkegel” – literally, the head of a bowling pin. Baldy became the more common name once more non-German speakers began making reference to the mountain.