By Myra Lee Adams Goff

When New Braunfels was settled by German immigrants in 1845, the land across the Comal and between that river and the Guadalupe river was not part of NB, but a settlement called Comaltown. The land was granted to Juan de Veramendi by the State of Coahuila and Texas by Jose Antonio Navarro, Commissioner. Eventually it was inherited by Veramendi’s daughter, Maria Antonio Veramendi Garza, and husband, Rafael Garza. Garza laid out lots in the area in 1846 and gave a double sized plaza (where McKenna Hospital is) as a park for people who bought lots and larger tracts for farming.

As more and more immigrants arrived, more land was needed soComaltown, Neighborsville, and Hortontown across the Guadalupe were settled. Hermann Seele writes in his diary that the first log cabin the he saw in Comaltown was in May of 1845.

Soon a thriving community evolved and a few early homes remain.Possibly the oldest (1852) belongs to Sophienburg director Linda Dietert and husband Mike on Garza. The Johann Georg Moeller home on Austin Street (later the Bavarian Village) was completed in 1857. The Voelcker home on Union belonging to Betty Kyle dates back to 1869. An 1881 hand-drawn map of New Braunfels points out some other homes; Heinrich Koehler on Torrey, Friedrich Rose on Austin Street, another home on Houston St., another on Garza, the Karbach house on Common Street, the building housing the former Morales Funeral Home and the Sunday House next to it on Common, a home on Houston Street and others. Let me know if you know of any other homes built before 1900.

Also seen on that 1881 map are buildings like Matzdorf Halle (Echo and then Eagles), and the Comal Union School, a private school operating for 30 years and eventually becoming a ward school. Rev. Schuchard of the German Protestant Church downtown was the part-time pastor of a Comaltown congregation and a teacher of the Comal Union School.(1858-1875) The first Methodist church was on Union Street.

Comaltown boasted grocery stores, a saloon or two, dance halls, rock companies, a bowling alley and others. With the Texas census of 1850, the city of New Braunfels was reported to have 1,298 citizens andComaltown, 286.

An area in Comaltown was subdivided in 1868 and called Braunfels. Encompassing 28 blocks with 12 lots each and an alley in the center of each block, the land was laid out around a central park that later housed Lamar School. The boundaries are Union Street, North Street, East Street, and South Street.

All of this talk about the Comaltown area leads me to think about the upcoming Comal County Fair. Two years ago I agreed to write a history of this celebration for the Comal County Fair Association. After exhausting the information that the CCFA had, I once again went to the Sophienburg for information. There I did research over 113 yearsfrom their files and local newspapers on microfilm. The outcome is It’sFair Time and it is now for sale at the fairgrounds and the Sophienburg. Check it out.

Begun in 1892 as a moneymaker for the Krankenhouse (hospital), theFair first bought its property on the Guadalupe River (24 acres) and then in 1923 bought three blocks in the Braunfels subdivision.Remember one of the boundaries of the subdivision was East Street? Well, it now runs through the middle of the fairgrounds. When you drive onto the fairgrounds from Common Street, on the right are the original 24 acres and on the left are the three blocks out of Braunfels Subdivision.

Next week is the Comal County Fair. From where would I like to watch the big parade? If wishes were horses, I would ride down to Main Plaza, get into a time machine and go to the third floor attic of the Landa Mansion, formerly located on Main Plaza where the ComalCounty Commissioner’s Court is. This gorgeous example of Victorian architecture was demolished in 1962. I’m swept back to a time in 1945 when it was the home of classmate Ellie Luckett. A bunch of us went to the movies at the Brauntex and then walked to Ellie’s house.

The house was really something. Built shortly before 1900, it had some special features that most of us had never seen; a marble bathtub on a pedestal, dumb waiters, and a communication system of pipes in the walls. You just talked into the pipes and the sound carried to different floors. No electric bills. Come to think of it, I was on the roof of my house as a child and talked down a vent pipe. My mother claimed that she heard me up the kitchen sink.

The real fun in the Landa house came when we went up to the attic. There we found a box of monocles (those little eyepieces for one eye), WWI newspapers and old clothes left behind by the Landa family. Then right in the middle of the front wall was a small round window through which you could look straight down San Antonio Street. Now that would be a true bird’s eye view of the parade!

Watching the parade from the Plaza.

By Myra Lee Adams Goff

Have you ever eaten white paste? If you have, you probably went to school in the ‘30s and ‘40s. I never ate paste myself because I was told it was made out of horses’ hooves, and that did it! No paste for me, but I did chew on pencils and an occasional crayon. When there were real fountain pens that you had to fill up with ink, some kids actually imbibed in blue ink. You could tell by the remnants of ink at the corner of their mouths. What a diet. Why this strange menu, I wonder. Paste, pencils, and ink for a drink.

Lamar Elementary School (and I suppose Carl Schurz Elementary) had its first school cafeteria in the early ‘40s. Government surplus made up a lot of the menu, like peanut butter and bananas. My first and last peanut butter and banana sandwich was eaten there. Maybe this is why children munched on school supplies.

In the ‘60s when I was teaching at Carl Schurz, peanut butter was again a surplus commodity. There were barrels and barrels of it. All this peanut butter had to be dealt with. My favorite was a single slice of tomato with two ice cream scoops of pb on top. If we had gotten a doggie bag we could have made two sandwiches for supper. Another day we had a pb cookie that was four inches across. The cooks did a good job at both of these schools adjusting to all those surplus commodities.

In the 1840s the settlers would have given anything for any kind of surplus, especially for school children. Once upon a time local historical hero Hermann Seele was contracted with the Adelsverein to teach school to the children of immigrants who came to New Braunfels. Right below the area that later came to be called Sophienburg Hill (where our museum is located) there was in 1845 a huge elm forest. A spot was chosen in that forest to conduct the first school on August 11, 1845. Fifteen children showed up to be taught reading, writing, and arithmetic in German and in English. Come to think of it, Seele was way ahead of his time with his “open classroom, no walls concept”. That approach to education was tried in the 1960’s but didn’t last long.

When Seele came from Germany he brought along a teaching device called an orrery (planetarium). It had only eight planets because Pluto wasn’t discovered until 1930. Now Pluto has been thrown out as a planet. Science books everywhere are out of date and Seele’s orrery is the latest in planetariums, even though it’s over 160 years old. The Sophienburg Museum has a nice exhibit dealing with education in New Braunfels. It features Seele and his orrery. There is also a video about NB education made by students of Heidi O’Keefe, German teacher at Canyon High School.

Just 13 years after that first school under the trees, the Texas Legislature chartered the New Braunfels Academy and granted it the right to levy taxes. Thus NB became the first tax-supported school in the state of Texas.

What happened to those elm trees? One by one they fell as homes and roads were built until there was only one large tree left in the middle of the street at the bottom of the Sophienburg hill. Once I ran into it head-on skating down that hill. Alas, the tree succumbed to asphalt and it looked so pitiful that it was removed, but there is a plaque in the middle of the street that marks the spot. There is also a huge hunk of the trunk in the museum. This lone tree was by itself for such a long time that everyone assumed that it was the tree under which Seele taught. No research marks a specific tree, only that he taught “under the elms”.

The Warnecke pictures of last column brought some interesting response. Myrtle Nowotny said that her brother, Louis “Sonny” Meyer was right there near the front. Kenneth Brietzke said that his brothers Carlon and Raymond were both there, as was Walter “Boobie” Hartmann and Louie Jonas. Kenneth called his older brother Carlon who lives in Chicago and he gave some interesting facts about the day that the Life photographer showed up. He said that the guy just rounded up everyone that he could and they hauled tubes down from the bathhouse for the “train”. Last week two Life magazines surfaced at the Sophienburg and revealed that the picture was actually a feature cover for an inside story, and not the outside cover.

NBHS Class of 1907. Seated, L-R: Olga Baus, Erna Holekamp, Marguerite Guenther; standig L-R: Walter Babel, Erna Albrecht, Herbert Fischer.