Last call for liberty
By Keva Hoffmann Boardman — New Braunfels citizens have never been shy in expressing their opinions in print or in demonstration. No other subject was more hotly contested than the issue of prohibition. In December 1917, the 18th Amendment – the Prohibition Amendment – was passed. It banned the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating […]
River Road reverie
By Tara V. Kohlenberg — The Guadalupe River is always there. It is life-sustaining water. It rages. It slows to a trickle. It calls us to fish, to play, or to watch sunlight dance off its surface as it rolls on toward the coast. The river beckons us to gather at its edge to make […]
Fireworks and pharmacists
By Keva Hoffmann Boardman — The first ever 4th of July celebration was held in Philadelphia on July 4, 1777; it included an exhibition which began and ended with 13 rockets — one for each state of the new United States of America. New Braunfels’ first July 4th celebration was in 1846, after Texas had […]
New Braunfels history for a rainy day
By Simon V. Simek — Considering the rainy days we had last week after such a long dry spell, we thought it relevant to help tell the history of New Braunfels’ eternally erratic weather, and our long-standing feud with rushing water. Diving into the archives, we found some tremendous accounts of how our predecessors fared […]
2026 Myra Lee Adams Goff Scholarship Award
2026 Myra Lee Adams Goff Scholarship Award Essay – by Jaelynn Davidson The Texas Hill Country was a stunning and dangerous arena of cultural conflict in the mid-19th century. To the Texas nobility of the Adelsverein, it was a fantasy of a “New Germany”; to the German peasants who arrived on the shores of the […]
Remembering a time of war, air raid drills, victory gardens and sacrifice
I really haven’t lived through a major war, but my mom and dad did. I have heard their stories and they are very different because Mom lived on a ranch/farm north of Fredericksburg and Dad lived in New Braunfels. Myra Lee Adams Goff grew up with my dad and she described those times through the […]
True Crime Series: Murder of a First Founder
By Myra Lee Adams Goff — “Have you heard? Old Squire Moeschen is dead!” So begins Hermann Seele’s narrative of a murder here in New Braunfels in 1855. Seele spun this true, gruesome tale in his book, Die Cypress, which is available at Sophie’s Shop. Here’s the background: Christof Moeschen, born in 1806 in Thuringia, […]
Karbach family responsible for Methodism in New Braunfels
By Myra Lee Adams Goff Methodism is a Protestant religion whose roots can be traced way back to a preacher named John Wesley in England. John Wesley and his brother Charles, while at Oxford University in 1739, began a movement devoted to helping the underprivileged. Fellow students called them “Methodists” for the methods they used […]
Phoenix Saloon applies for historical designation
By Myra Lee Adams Goff Another downtown building, the Phoenix Saloon owners Ross and Debbie Fortune, are applying for a Texas Historical Marker. The Phoenix Saloon history really does live up to the story of the Phoenix, a legendary bird that builds its own funeral pyre, throws itself into the fire, lays an egg in […]
Depression years affected everyone
By Myra Lee Adams Goff The fall and failure of the Stock Market in 1929 was the beginning of an era in American history called the Great Depression. The statistics of this period are staggering. Almost half of the people in the United States had no jobs, homes or food. Leading up to this period […]
