By Myra Lee Adams Goff An interesting change took place recently in one of the Sophienburg Museum’s displays. Switching from one end to the other, the shoe display was changed to hats and all details of millinery. The hats on display belonged to NB women, made of straw, horsehair, and

By Myra Lee Adams Goff “Stars and Stripes Forever”. Thirty seven stars, that is, for in 1876 when the United States commemorated the 100th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, NB celebrated a glorious old-fashioned 4th of July. There is an article in the Sophienburg archives translated from

By Myra Lee Adams Goff Doroteo Rodriguez and son Dagoberto have been doing research on their family that goes back to Mexico, where records are hard to find. To this point most of their history has been passed on byword of mouth, but as family members moved away from NB.it became

By Myra Lee Adams Goff Imagine that it’s the 1920s and you have reservations at Camp Placid at Landa Park in New Braunfels, Texas. Camp Placid was a two storied summer resort on the banks of the spring-fed Pool at Landa’s Park. It was called Landa’s Park because it belonged to

By Myra Lee Adams Goff “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy” (Hamlet), meaning that the obvious is not the only thing there, and that’s true in Landa Park as well. I went to the park looking for historically unobvious, little known

By Myra Lee Adams Goff Proclaiming themselves the Huck Finns of New Braunfels, Carroll Hoffmann and Doyle Krueger recently talked about their exploratory activities under the city streets. Mark Twain, author of “Huckleberry Finn” described Huck in this way: “There were things which he stretched, but mostly he told the

By Myra Lee Adams Goff There was a time when women and alligators and catfish and perhaps a man or two sat side by side in the Phoenix Saloon and Beer Garden. Why is this such a big deal, you ask. It’s because it just wasn’t socially acceptable for women to frequent saloons and alligators

By Myra Lee Adams Goff One of my favorite historical places to go is the middle of the Faust Street Bridge and look upstream to where the first settlers crossed the Guadalupe on their way into NB. I have walked Nacogdoches St. on the east side of Seguin Ave. towards

By Myra Lee Adams Goff It’s been four years since Jennifer Niven wrote the book “Ada Blackjack” in which she told a 1921 tale of an ill-fated Arcticexpedition to Wrangel Island by four men and an Inuit Eskimo woman (Blackjack). One of the men was New Braunfelser Milton Galle. Niven’s local resource

By Myra Lee Adams Goff Possibly you, as I, have never heard of August Heinrich Hoffmann (von Fallersleben) (1798-1874). A renowned German poet, Hoffmann had a philosophy of freedom that was one of the strong factors leading to emigration to Texas from Germany. The translated poems and the info for this