By Myra Lee Adams Goff

Can you think of three words that would describe what was important to your mother’s generation? How about your grandmother’s? Go back one more generation and it’s easy because that generation of immigrant women spelled it out: “Küche, Kirche, und Kinder, or “kitchen, church and children”. Written accounts bear this out. We know a lot about women’s lives from Luise Ervendberg.

One hundred sixty five years ago on March 21, 1845, the first settlers crossed the Guadalupe, making their way to their first encampment in New Braunfels. Along with this group came Louis and Luise Ervendberg. Louis had been hired by Prince Carl to tend to the religious needs of the colonists. The Adelsverein organization that promoted the emigration project from Germany paid for the erection of a small log hut for the Ervendbergs and next to it the first log church of the German Protestant Church.

The next year from May to July of 1846 torrential rains flooded Texas. Sickness broke out on the coast while the emigrants were waiting for transportation inland. Some emigrants decided to walk to New Braunfels, only to be stranded on the other side of the flooding Guadalupe.

Some of the emigrants that arrived in New Braunfels brought disease to the settlement. To take care of the sick and not expose them to the other inhabitants, pavilions with thatched roofs were set up near the river. Dr. Koester and others checked on them, but nothing was available to help these poor souls. Church records show 348 deaths that year alone.

Meanwhile in town, 60 orphaned children were being taken care of by the Ervendbergs. Tents had been set up on the church property. Eventually all but 19 children were claimed by friends and relatives. These 19 children, ranging in age from four to fourteen, would become part of the Ervendberg family.

Bursting at the seams, Louis Ervendberg requested land so that he could raise food for the family. In 1848, the Western Texas Orphanage Asylum was incorporated by Ludwig Bene, Hermann Spiess, and Ervendberg. The building was of cedar timber filled in with sundried adobe brick and covered with pine clapboard. Three and a half miles from the middle of town on the Guadalupe River, the orphanage was known as the Waisenhaus, believed to be the first orphanage in Texas.

Due to salary issues, Ervendberg resigned as pastor of the church in 1850, devoting full time to his now family of 26. We have family accounts of life at the orphanage through descendants, mainly through daughter Augusta and the seven Timmermann sisters of Geronimo.

A school house was set up for both the boys and girls. Louis taught geography, language, math, religion, and science in particular. He had requested silk worms from his botanist friend Asa Gray, and thread and cloth was produced. They grew tobacco, rolled the leaves into cigars and sold them in town. The boys did all the farming. They fished and gathered clams from the Guadalupe, and hunted deer and wild game.

The girls learned from Luise the things that were important to her. Remember the Küche, Kirche und Kinder? They learned to cook and sew. They gathered grapes, wild plums and honey. Twenty small loaves of bread had to be baked each day and cheese and butter had to be made.

The Waisenhaus eventually was inherited by Kaleen Acker, a g-g-granddaughter of Luise Ervendberg. She and her husband Herbert Acker moved into the orphanage in 1954. When Kaleen died, Herbert stayed on. Recently he turned the property over to his niece, Ramona Acker Peck. She and her husband plan to renovate and preserve the Waisenhaus.

Although Ramona Peck is not an actual descendent of the Ervendbergs, she has another interesting connection. She is the g-g-granddaughter of one of the orphans, Christian Guenther. This turn of events is a plus for historic preservation.

Augusta Ervendberg Wiegraeffe shortly before her death in 1940.

By Myra Lee Adams Goff

Now keep on writing what you know
About the things you do,
And share with us your memories
So we can learn from you.

Have you ever thought about the importance of writing in a diary and keeping a scrapbook and what this process has done for history?

One hundred seventy five years ago, emigrants wrote letters home to Germany telling about their journey to Texas. We know a great deal about early New Braunfels from those letters and from prolific writers like Roemer, Seele, Sörgel and others. Prince Carl’s papers give us yet another interpretation of the political side of the settlement.

A new exhibit called “Bon Voyage” inside the Sophienburg Museum this month will highlight the era between the two world wars, WWI (1914-1918) and WWII (1941-1945) and is based on the diary and scrapbook of Marie Rose Remmel who traveled through Europe in 1930. Twenty-eight years old at the time, she traveled with a group known as the Christian Endeavor Friendship Pilgrimage, for which she worked as a writer.

The scrapbook and diary were given recently to the Sophienburg. Remmel volunteered at the Archives and in 1982 at the age of 80 she was honored with the “Volunteer of the Year” award.

The Christian Endeavor group with whom Remmel traveled was on its way to a convention in Berlin. Before and after the convention the group did extensive travel through the Netherlands, Scotland, Germany, Austria, England, France, Italy, and Czechoslovakia. Remmel’s keen observation is apparent through her description of the visited areas and her skill as a photographer.

The 80-year-old scrapbook is even a good example for today’s scrapbook enthusiasts. Wonderful, clear black and white photos were probably a result of a simple camera. Adding souvenirs here and there, she put in edelweiss flowers long before those flowers were made popular by “The Sound of Music.” A melted candle that was used while going through the catacombs of Italy has lost its lighting ability.

When reading the diary, one cannot help but realize that the places Remmel visited in 1930 are the same places that tourists visit now — London Bridge, Tower of London, Buckingham Palace, windmills, castles, University of Heidelberg, the Black Forest, the Alps, Oberammergau, Neuschwanstein, St. Peter’s Square, Sistine Chapel, Arc de Triomphe, Louvre, Eiffel Tower, and on and on. Who would have known that Europe would look so different just a few years later? The Sophienburg will supplement the diary and scrapbook with period articles taken from its historic collection.

If you kept a diary or you were a letter-writer in the past, you have probably discovered that many of the details that you wrote you don’t even remember. There’s just too much for our conscious brain to retain. My mother, Cola Moeller Adams, was the ultimate in journal and scrapbook keeping. I have books of photos and remarks about the things she thought and did in the 1920s. In 1924 my mother graduated from N.B.H.S. and kept a book of all the senior activities, including a plan of the dresses that she was going to have sewed her senior year along with prices and swatches of material. She told of her speech as salutatorian of her class on graduation night. To her horror, her long ruffled skirt got caught in a fan on the stage and was almost ripped off. I’m going to give the Sophienburg a copy because of what they can learn about the “Roaring 20s.”

I’m sure Marie Rose Remmel never dreamed that her writing would be read eighty years later, and yet diaries, scrapbooks, journals, letters, are the best ways of preserving memories.

And still remember present time
Will only shortly last,
And then will be, however lived
A memory of the past.

—Anonymous

On board the S.S. Aurania, August 31, 1930. L-R is Lillie Schultz, Marie Remmel, and Lillian Elmendorf.