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, […]
What a woman!
By Myra Lee Adams Goff One of the more exciting stories concerning the early settlers of New Braunfels was that of Betty Holekamp charging across the Guadalupe on a horse after Prince Carl’s spectacular show of bravado. The story was probably somewhat embellished over the years, but nevertheless it’s a good one. Prince Carl was […]
Artist Iwonski part of Civil War exhibit
By Myra Lee Adams Goff On May 19th the Sophienburg Museum and Archives will present a Civil War Exhibit about what was happening here in Comal County during the war and the period of Restoration which followed it. One segment of the exhibit, sponsored jointly by the NB German American Society, will feature the art […]
Seele’s tale of murder gruesome
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” available at Sophie’s Shop. Here’s the background: Christof Moeschen, born in 1806 in Thuringia, came to Texas […]
Furniture sold here since 1902
By Keva Hoffmann Boardman — Last week I took on the challenge of finding out about City Lot 89. It is located on the corner of South Seguin Avenue and Coll Street, across from the First Protestant Church. We know it today as the location of Johnson Furniture Co and their lovely, landscaped corner. This […]
New Braunfels has seen several daring jailbreaks
By Keva Hoffmann Boardman — I recently found a note in Oscar Haas’s archive collection, “Zeitung, Thursday, July 6, 1899. Use story some time concerning a jailbreak.” He never published the story. I felt like he was “speaking from the grave” and I should look into it. The first purpose-built Comal County Jail was a […]
Weather reports from New Braunfels
By Keva Hoffmann Boardman — I wake up in the morning and the first thing I do is pull up the weather app on my phone. I want to know temperature and precipitation possibilities in order to get dressed appropriately. Humans have always watched the weather. Where to settle, when to plant and harvest, what […]
Bohemian John
By Keva Hoffmann Boardman — The best part of the local newspaper, for me, has always been the “society pages”. Since the Neu-Braunfelser Zeitung’s first issue back in 1852, there was always a section for local news called Lokales (German for local). This section described events, weddings, the births of babies and funerals. It told […]
New Braunfels forty-eighters
By Keva Hoffmann Boardman — The forty-eighters were refugees of the failed German Revolution of 1848. They were idealists. They fought to establish a liberal and unified Germany using liberty, democracy and unity as their main tenets. The designation “forty-eighter” excludes the hundreds of thousands who emigrated from 1848-1852 for mostly economic reasons. It also […]
The museum’s Mormon mystery
By Keva Hoffmann Boardman – I just finished an exhibit on the Waissenhaus or Orphan’s Home. Organized in 1848 near Gruene, it was the first orphanage in Texas. I perused the Sophienburg’s collections to find original artifacts to use in the exhibit, and knew that of two large dough troughs, one was used at Waissenhaus. […]
