The History of Fredericksburg, Texas

The German Emigration Company, or Adelsverein, was organized in 1842 to establish a new Germany on Texas soil, between the Llano and Colorado rivers. The first settlers arrived in December of 1844. On March 15, 1845 the city of New Braunfels was established as the first in a projected series of settlements. On May 8, John Meusebach arrived in Texas and began setting up the new settlement sixty miles northwest of New Braunfels, where two streams met four miles above the Pedernales River.

The first wagontrain of 120 settlers arrived from New Braunfels on May 8, 1846, after a sixteen-day journey, and Meusebach named the new settlement Fredericksburg after Prince Frederick of Prussia. Each settler received one town lot and ten acres of farmland nearby. The town was laid out like the German villages along the Rhine with one long, wide main street roughly paralleling Town Creek.

Within two years Fredericksburg had grown into a thriving town of almost 1,000, despite an epidemic that killed between 100 and 150 residents in the summer and fall of 1846. Those two years also saw the opening of a wagon road between Fredericksburg and Austin; the signing of the Meusebach-Comanche Treaty, which effectively eliminated the threat of Indian attack, and is the only treaty between whites and Indians that was never broken; the construction of the Vereins-Kirche, which served for fifty years as a church, school, fortress, and meeting hall; the formal organization of Gillespie County by the Texas legislature, which made Fredericksburg the county seat; the construction of the Nimitz Hotel; and the establishment by the United States Army of Fort Martin Scott, which became an important market for the merchants and laborers of Fredericksburg, two miles east of town. Fredericksburg also benefited from its location as the last town before El Paso on the Emigrant or Upper El Paso Road.

Religion played an important part in the lives of the German settlers of Gillespie County. Devout farmers drove as much as twenty miles into town for religious services and built Fredericksburg's characteristic Sunday houses for use on weekends and religious holidays.

Fredericksburg, like many of the German communities in south central Texas, generally supported the Union in the Civil War. And the people of Fredericksburg and Gillespie County suffered under Confederate martial law, imposed in 1862, and from the depredations of such outlaws as James P. Waldrip, who was shot by an unknown assassin beneath a live oak tree outside the Nimitz Hotel in 1867.

After the war, the Germans tried to maintain their independence by steadfastly refusing to learn or use English. Not until after 1900 were the first purely English-speaking teachers employed in Fredericksburg's public schools. During World War I, the Germans were looked on with suspicion, and the local papers started publishing in English. The suspicion of Germans didn’t occur during World War II, and Fredericksburg’s own Chester Nimitz became Commander in Chief of the Pacific forces during World War II.

After the war, Fredericksburg began to grow and attract tourists to experience the German heritage of the area. Today, it is one of Texas’ most visited destninations.