San Antonio was founded by Edmund F. Dunne, an Irish American who had previously served as chief justice of the Arizona Territory.

The following year on February 15, 1882, while surveying the Disston Purchase with his cousin, Captain Hugh Dunne, he came upon a previously unsurveyed lake with crystal-clear water.

Seeing in a prayer book that it was the feast day of St. Jovita, he named the lake after the early Christian martyr.

[2][3][4][13] Judge Dunne selected the city's location on Lake Jovita's western shore and began settling it in earnest.

Dunne planned several other villages for the surrounding area including St. Thomas, Villa Maria, Carmel and San Felipe, but only the rural community of St. Joseph survives today.

[2][3][4] In San Antonio's early years, Dunne only permitted practicing Roman Catholics to settle in the colony.

The earliest settlers were mostly of Irish descent, but San Antonio's numbers were soon bolstered by German immigrants, who came to form about half the city's population by the mid-1880s.

Earlier that year five Benedictine sisters established Holy Name Convent in the center of San Antonio.

The sisters had the convent and the academy physically moved by oxen to a 40-acre parcel in St. Leo overlooking the southwestern shore of Lake Jovita in 1911.

[21] The clerk further asserted that most of the residents received their mail via post office box, which the US Census Bureau would not send forms to.

Saint Anthony Catholic School (grades PreK–8) traces its roots to the Fall of 1883 when local widow Cecilia Morse began teaching colony children in her home.

[27] Holy Name Academy (grades 1–12) was established in 1889 as an "all-girls" boarding school by the Benedictine Sisters of Florida, but moved to the neighboring town of St. Leo in 1911.