This traveling exhibit has been rescheduled
for Jan. 12-Feb. 9, 2010.

By Myra Lee Adams Goff

The Sophienburg’s first traveling exhibit will be open at the museum on Tuesday, Jan. 12 and stay through Feb. 9. Hours are 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. excluding Mondays and Sundays.

The exhibit called “Vanished” is about the German-American Civilian Internment that took place from 1941-1948. An organization called “Traces” brings living history to towns and in this case, to Texas towns.

For a donation of $5 to the Sophienburg, one may view narrative panels, see a NBC Dateline documentary, and see a 1945 US Government film. Your donation will also cover your entry into the museum. The sponsoring organization is non-profit and contributions are tax-deductible.

Immediately after the bombing of Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt issued a presidential proclamation to authorize the US to detain allegedly potential dangerous enemy aliens of Japanese, German, and Italian descent living throughout the US. Thousands were arrested, some did have Axis sympathies, many were released, but many were interned with little or no evidence against them. Remember Roosevelt’s famous saying, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself”? How does that fit this situation?

Was there anyone from NB arrested? I don’t know the answer. Was the FBI undercover here? Probably. I do know that everyone who went into the service from predominantly German towns was thoroughly investigated. The flip side to that is that many went into intelligence work because of their knowledge of German.

As a young teenager, I heard stories of Nazi sympathizers in town. The reality was that very few NB Germans had relatives left in Germany because most had been Americans for four or five generations.

There was much discrimination against German-Americans when WWI broke out. By 1918, it was against the law to teach German in the schools, to speak German on the playground or in public places. Both my parents were in elementary school here in NB when that war broke out. Both had been taught in German and English.

When WWII began, the German language was on its way out. Few of my generation can speak German at all. “Wie shade” (What a shame). Supposedly it was unpatriotic to speak German, but a lot of the older people from out in the country couldn’t speak English so you could still hear German in the stores and on the streets in NB.

We have a great family story about speaking German. My dad, Marcus Adams went to A&M College. His freshman year he took German (an easy “A”). Immediately he was put in advanced German because he was good at it. His first assignment was to write an essay in German. He did just that, but he wrote it in Fraktur (old German script). The prof couldn’t read it because they were no longer teaching this old writing in Germany. Dad made straight A’s.

Look at the picture. It takes place in Kenedy, Texas, where a German internment camp was located and where my husband’s family lived. Glyn was the youngest of five children. He remembers the trainloads of prisoners being brought into Kenedy at night. The shades were drawn, supposedly so they wouldn’t know where they were. The camp was an old converted CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) building. Glyn’s sister Joyce was part of the Methodist Youth Group that had permission to sing Christmas songs to the prisoners. She has a vivid memory of the prisoners on the other side of the fence.

Those that died while incarcerated were buried in the city cemetery, but on the other side of the road. Glyn’s mother told me that a young man had been buried there and after the war, his parents made a pilgrimage to Kenedy from overseas once a year to visit his grave.

“Vanished” is a disturbing story. In wartime, fear motivates distrust, and prejudice can result. Come see it.

Camp Kenedy -- German repatriates leaving for Jersey City. (Camp Administration building in background.)

By Myra Lee Adams Goff

Hermann Seele arrived in Galveston on Dec. 13, 1843. He had come alone to make his home in Texas. On Christmas Eve, he walked the streets of Galveston totally alone and his thoughts were of home in Germany. He remembered how the children stepped up to the glittering Christmas tree and thought, “I wish I could be with them for only an hour, I am so alone here…” Then he saw a Christmas tree through the shutters of a home and the happy children and the faces of the little children heightened his loneliness.

The next Christmas (1844), Seele had been in the coastal area for another year. Nostalgic thoughts of Christmas led him to write in his diary:”Memories, sweeten for me lonely as I am in a foreign country, the hours with the balsam of a wonderful past”. (Source: “The Diary of Hermann Seele”)

A month before Seele was spending his second Christmas in the coastal area in 1844, the first Adelsverein brig, the Johann Dethardt sailed into Galveston harbor. They had finally arrived at the Republic of Texas. By Dec. 1, three one-mast schooners picked up these first emigrants in Galveston to take them to Pt. Lavaca. Two of the three vessels made it easily through Pasa Caballo into Matagorda Bay and then landed on the shore at Pt. Lavaca. There they camped under the open skies for the night. From there they moved to the first camp among the live oaks.

The third schooner had been caught in a storm and driven back into the Gulf of Mexico. The craft had sprung a leak. For days the storm carried the small craft towards Mexico. Finally the winds shifted from the south, moving the schooner back to the Texas coast and into a shallow bay, but during the night a norther tossed the boat so violently that the chain was broken and the boat was once again carried southward. After winds calmed, the vessel finally made its way into the bay. The other earlier arrivals were on the shore greeting them with relief.

Prince Carl greeted the first emigrants and it was at the encampment two miles west of Port Lavaca that the first German emigrants of the Adelsverein held their first church service in the Republic of Texas. The day was Dec. 23, 1844 and the service was conducted by Rev. Louis Cachand Ervendberg who had been hired by Prince Carl to tend to the religious needs of the emigrants.

The prince was aware that Christmastime would be a particularly difficult time for the emigrants, so he cut a small oak tree and decorated it with candles and provided small gifts for the children. There were no fir trees on the coast for the traditional “Tannenbaum”.

On Christmas Eve, the passengers from the second Adelsverein ship, the Herschel, had arrived safely at Carlshafen. On Christmas day, Rev. Ervendberg held the first Communion Service for the new arrivals. The prince presented them with a silver chalice, a communion flagen (pitcher) and a communion paten (wafer plate) to the pastor for use of the first church. Those items are on display at the First Protestant Church. The chalice would forever be a link between the new land and the old, as a duplicate would reside in the ancestral home in Braunfels Germany. (Info Source: “Journey in Faith”; Rosemarie Leissner Gregory and Myra Lee Adams Goff”)

The first emigrants arrived in New Braunfels on March, 1845, and Hermann Seele joined the Adelsverein’s second group six weeks late in May of 1845. The next Christmas in 1845 was the first Christmas spent in New Braunfels, their “Neu Heimatland” (new homeland).

Fröliche Weihnachten from the Sophienburg!

The first settlers celebrate with a church service on the Texas coast, 1844. Patricia S. Arnold, Illustrator

By Myra Lee Adams Goff

Prince Carl, leader of the Adelsverein emigration group and Alamo hero Jim Bowie were vastly different from each other. And yet, the two had a round-about connection. They were both in Texas at about the same time, they both had a New Braunfels connection, and they made enough of an impact to be in history books.

By now, you probably know about Prince Carl’s role in the founding of NB, but do you know how Jim Bowie fits in the picture?

At the Sophienburg, Joy Alexander recently researched the Juan Martin de Veramendi family. He became the vice governor of Coahuila y Tejas 1831. Alexander was led on a path of this interesting story: Ambitious young Jim Bowie floated lumber to market and invested his funds in property, often without a clear title. With a somewhat shaky reputation, he loved hunting, fishing, riding wild horses, and trapping alligators and bears. A true adventurer!

Bowie and his brother engaged in the slave trade with the pirate Lafitte on Galveston Island. Hot-tempered Bowie got in a fight with a banker who wouldn’t give him a loan and the banker fired a gun at him, leading to a gun fight. One story goes that Bowie’s brother provided him with a large butcher-like hunting knife and he won the fight with the “Bowie knife”.

In 1830 Bowie came to Texas and posing as a man of wealth, introduced himself to Juan Veramendi, He went into business with Veramendi. and then married his daughter, Ursula. Some stories say they had two children and that the president of Mexico, Santa Anna, was godfather to one of them. Bowie was on the receiving end of the Veramendi family, even moving into their palace. He spent little time at home, as he looked for lost gold in the San Saba mines.

In 1833, Ursula, her children, and her parents died of cholera in Coahuila, Mexico. Meanwhile Bowie was ill with yellow fever and did not know of their deaths. Interestingly, he wrote a will in which he left his estate to his brother and sister. Three years later Jim Bowie died in the Alamo. Speculation is that he was incapacitated with TB, but the movies show him battling from his cot with his famous Bowie Knife.

Now let’s compare Bowie with Prince Carl.

Prince Carl was born at Neustrelitz on July 27, 1812. He had many prestigious relatives, not the least of which were Queen Victoria and Czar Alexander of Russia. The handsome spirited youth was educated as a soldier and because of his family connections, he secured many prestigious military assignments and awards.

In 1839 he was sentenced by a Prussian Court to four months in prison for AWOL. (Source: “Handbook of Texas”). At the age of 22 he married a “commoner” and they had three children (a no no for him) and divorced her in 1841.

Prince Carl then worked to promote the Adelsverein to sponsor emigration to Texas. He made quite a stir in his military get-up when he arrived in Galveston in 1844. Right after the settlers arrived, he purchased the Comal Tract from landowners Rafael Garza and wife Maria, heirs to Juan Veramendi.

The Prince stayed in New Braunfels two months and left to marry Princess Sophie. Back in Germany he continued his military career, retired as field marshal in 1868, and died in 1875 at the age of 63.

Now here’s the Bowie/Solms connection, as remote as it is: Bowie’s father-in-law, Juan Martin de Veramendi, was also the father-in-law of Rafael Garza, married to Maria Veramendi, from whom Prince Carl bought the Comal Tract. (Ursula Bowie and Maria Garza were sisters)

Really stretch your imagination and you just might say that there is a connection between the Sophienburg and the Alamo.

Jim Bowie in front of the Veramendi Palace and Prince Carl in front of the Braunfels Castle.