Local Stories in Gillespie County
Texas·8 places
History
Braeutigam's Garten
The United States Army built a post on Barons Creek in December 1848 and gave it up in December 1853, the frontier line having moved west past it. What happened to the buildings afterwards is the better half of the story. Johann Wolfgang Braeutigam had come over in 1845 as a boy of sixteen, with his parents and two sisters, and married Christine Kensing in 1850.
Quirky
Hondo Crouch
John Russell Crouch, who went by Hondo, after the town he was born in, bought a near abandoned village in the early 1970s and turned it into a joke that outlived him. He had been a serious athlete first: a Southwest Conference champion swimmer at the University of Texas, a two time All American and team captain who competed in western clothes and was known as the Swimming Cowboy.
Education
Junction School
Lyndon Johnson signed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act on 11 April 1965 at a picnic table on the lawn of the one room schoolhouse where he had started school fifty three years earlier, and he asked his first teacher to sit beside him while he did it. Kate Deadrich Loney had taught him in 1912, when he was four years old.
History
Sauer-Beckmann Farm
A good cotton crop in 1915 paid for the Victorian house at the Sauer-Beckmann farmstead, and the price of it is recorded: a thousand dollars, in a year when cotton went from nine cents a pound to twenty in a single month.
Entertainment
The Albert Dance Hall
Max Beckman built a tin clad dance hall with wooden beams and hinged side flaps for ventilation in 1922, in a village of about fifty people, and German brass bands rotated through it from the other halls in the county. The settlement had been founded in 1877 as Martinsburg by Fritz Wilke, George Maenius and John Petri, who left Fredericksburg looking for pasture.
History
The Easter Fires
The state of Texas put a story on a roadside marker in 1968 that cannot be true, and what undoes it is a calendar. The marker says that in March 1847, when Comanches and whites signed a major peace treaty, the Indians lighted huge signal fires on the hills, and that a mother calmed her children by telling them the smoke came from pots in which the Easter Bunny was dyeing eggs with flowers.
Nature
The Stonewall Peach
Gillespie County grows peaches because it is cold enough, which is not a sentence anyone expects about Texas. A peach tree needs a tally of winter hours below 45 degrees before it will set fruit properly, and Texas A and M AgriLife puts the requirement for Hill Country orchards at roughly 830 of them. Varieties grown in South Texas get by on as few as 200.
Nature
The Willow City Loop
Thirteen miles of county road run through private ranchland, and the arrangement is older and more deliberate than the traffic suggests. That part of Gillespie County had no public roads at all until 1934, when the Commissioners Court established a third class road forty feet wide from the Holmes-Moss Ranch across to the Llano and Fredericksburg road.
Elsewhere in Texas
Hear it from the road
Whistlestop tells you this story automatically when you drive past. No searching, no tapping, nothing to ask.
