The Texas Hills

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"I like what Wimberley does to people," says Chorine Wilson, the postmistress. "It lets them do what they want to do."

Other Texas Hill Towns

Unlike so much of the United States, where shopping malls and fast-food strips have made downtown shopping and socializing a thing of the past, the central sections of Hill Country towns are still alive and lovely. (This is also true of nearby San Antonio, the nation's tenth largest city, whose famous River Walk along the San Antonio River keeps its downtown humming late into the night.) Throughout the region, old buildings have been preserved or restored. Kendall County's small town of Comfort (pop. 1,460, and founded in 1854 by Ernest Altgelt, a German from Duesseldorf, where Cypress Creek meets the Guadalupe River, still has nearly 100 pre-1910 buildings within walking distance of the town's center. Comfort, in 1914, was the site of Texas's first ostrich farm, which died along with the craze for ostrich-feather fashions. Today, ostrich farming—for the sale of meat, leather and feathers—is making a comeback in the region. It was Comfort, too, that boasted the world's only armadillo farm. For several decades, Charles Apelt, a basket weaver, bred the animals and turned their shells into baskets, lampshades and other items. The ranch ceased operations only upon his death a few years ago.

Like most of Texas, the Hill Country reflects its Mexican heritage, but the strong influence of this region's German settlers is impossible to miss. It's still found in the place names, the architecture, the food, the festivals and even in the pre-barbed-wire stone fences that divide the landscape. Until World War II made it unpopular, the German language was widely spoken here.

New Braunfels (pop. 25,306), the county seat of Comal County, was established by German Prince Carl of Solms-Braunfels in his job as commissioner of the Adelsverein, a "Society for the Protection of German Immigrants in Texas," founded in 1842. In 1845, the prince purchased 1,265 acres on our country's shortest river, the beautiful three-and-one-quarter-mile-long Comal, fed by Comal Springs, one of the four biggest springs in Texas.

Today, New Braunfels is a lovely little city filled with parks, museums, German bakeries and restaurants, and old inns. Popular summer activities include tubing on the Comal and rafting on the nearby Guadalupe River. Four miles away, Gruene, settled by New Braunfels's overflow, started as a cotton-growing center that by 1882 had a mercantile store, lumberyard, beer garden and dance hall. It prospered until 1920, when the boll weevil and pink bollworm killed both King Cotton and the town. In the 1970s, however, tourist-trade entrepreneurs moved in and gave Gruene a new and delightful life that includes fine restaurants (one housed in the ruins of a cotton gin's brick boiler room that burned in 1922), an antique "mall" and a winery. The beer garden and dance hall, advertised as the oldest in Texas, are almost too popular.

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