The Texas Hills

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

But Prince Carl didn't stay around to enjoy the eventual success of his new colony. When his fiancee, Lady Sophia, princess of Salm-Salm, refused to come to Texas, he went back to Germany to marry her and never returned. By this time, the Adelsverein's coffers were empty. Nevertheless, thousands of Germans, having heard often-exaggerated tales of the wonders of this part of Texas, immigrated here. Overcoming Indian raids, outlaws and other perils and hardships, they founded prosperous settlements throughout the region. One of my favorites is Fredricksburg (pop. 7,423), the county seat of Gillespie County. It's located just a few miles from the Lyndon B. Johnson National Historic Site—part of the LBJ Ranch—and the LBJ State Historical Park. (The 36th president's boyhood home and the original Johnson Settlement are at Johnson City, pop. 914, county seat of adjoining Blanco County.)

From the replica of Fredricksburg's first building, the octagon-shaped Vereins Kirche, to the tiny "Sunday Houses" (weekend homes that out-of-town ranchers built so they could conduct business on Saturday and attend church on Sunday), the town is rich in Bavarian charm. The Admiral Nimitz Center was originally a hotel built in 1852 by the grandparents of Admiral Nimitz of World War II fame. This steamboat-shaped structure was once touted as the last "civilized outpost" for settlers headed west. It now houses the Museum of the Pacific War, with the Garden of Peace, a gift from the people of Japan, on the same grounds.

Fredricksburg shops are filled with handicrafts; its restaurants and bakeries with dark German ales, Wiener schnitzel and strudel. The town's unique Easter Fires Pageant is a re-enactment of the time when Fredricksburg's founder, John O. Meusebach (formerly Baron Ottfried Hans Von Meusebach), was negotiating a peace treaty with the surrounding Comanche Indians. A pioneer mother, whose husband was away at the Easter eve treaty meeting, calmed her children's fears by telling them that the flaring bonfires encircling the settlement were made by the Easter bunny boiling eggs to dye and place in their baskets on Easter morning. Actually, the fires signaled the Comanches that a treaty had been agreed upon.

The Gillespie County Fair, which will celebrate its 100th anniversary in Fredricksburg this August, is the state's oldest continuous fair, and the town's unrivaled Oktoberfest is only one more of its many festivals. Fredricksburg attracts over 400,000 visitors a year, and this influx, as well as the constantly increasing number of outsiders who want to settle in the Texas Hills, prompted one resident, when she discovered I was writing an article on the area, to plead, "Don't forget to mention the snakes, scorpions, flash floods and cedar fever." (Though the Hill Country climate has, from the beginning, been touted as ideal for sufferers of all types of lung problems, the pollen released from the region's numerous cedar trees causes allergic reactions in some people.)

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print