La Bahia's Turnverein

This hamlet is named after a Spanish road, and it was settled by Germans. The La Bahia Road was an east to west Indian trail long before anyone wrote it down, presumably known to Europeans as early as 1690, and later extended to Washington on the Brazos and to Goliad. It crossed the Brazos at the mouth of the Navasota and the Colorado near present La Grange, and at various times it was also called the Opelousas Road and the Lower Road, while its western section, laid out by Spanish authorities, was the Atascosito Road. It was never a surveyed line, more a braid of traces that shifted with the weather, and German immigrants who settled along it in the 1870s took its name for their community. A post office opened in 1879 and was gone by 1893, squeezed out by Burton and Carmine, two railroad towns each about three miles off. What survived was not the commerce but the club. Forty eight German settlers organised a Turnverein, a gymnastic and social society, on the fifth of July 1879. They bought three acres on the twenty fourth of June 1884 for ninety dollars, and the hall standing on the ground today dates from 1903. It draws visitors from Brenham and the nearby towns as it did in the 1930s, seats five or six hundred, and is booked most weekends. That is the shape of German Texas in miniature. The post office lasted fourteen years. The gymnastics club has outlived it by well over a century and is still going, because the thing holding the place together was never the mail.