This is the story of a boy born in Erbach, Hessen, Germany. It is about a boy who was fascinated with antlers. It is about that boy growing up and emigrating to Texas and creating his own future.

Ernst Dosch was born in 1822. He grew up hunting in the forests of Odenwald, the property of the Count of Erbach. The Count’s father had spent a lifetime collecting antiquities and antlers; the palace has one of the largest and oldest deer and roebuck antler collections in Europe. Young Ernst often walked through the Hirschgalerie at the palace, drawn to the variety and strangeness of the many abnormal antlers — antlers that displayed unusual arrangements and number of prongs.

Dosch graduated from the University of Giesen in Forestry and in 1848, he followed other students to the fabled land of “Texas”. He met young men on board the vessel “Louis” who became lifelong friends and business partners: Julius Dressel, Ludwig von Lichtenberg, G. Theissen, the Dittmar brothers and Ulrich Rische.

Ernst’s Texas story began when he settled with his new friends and some of the Vierziger at the Darmstaedter Farm (present day Danville area in Comal County). The Vierziger or “The Forty” or the Darmstaedters, were a group of about 40 young men from the Darmstadt area who were recruited by Prince Carl and the Adelsverein to set up a utopian socialistic colony in Texas (see https://sophienburg.wpenginepowered.com/?s=Darmstadt for more information). Almost immediately, the marvelous hunting possibilities in Texas took hold of him and he began to collect his own antler specimens.

Socialism was not for Ernst, and he joined up with the local Texas Rangers for a brief stint. He is later often referred to as Capt. Dosch because of this. In 1851, Dosch and his shipmate von Lichtenberg bought Lot #55 (202 S. Seguin) in New Braunfels. After Dosch constructed a building on it, he, with partner Rudolph Nauendorf, opened a store/saloon. This little building became the Star Exchange Saloon and now sits at Old Town at Conservation Plaza.

The newspaper says that times were tough and Dosch moved his business to San Antonio. His friend Ulrich Rische took over the saloon. Buying a lot on Commerce Street, Dosch and a Mr. Wiener opened a saloon and soon built up a nice clientele. In 1861, the outbreak of the Civil War sent Dosch off to Mexico where he lived in Piedras Negras and Monterrey where it seems he made a great deal of money. Dosch then travelled back to Germany in 1863.

On his return to San Antonio in 1866, Dosch got Ulrich Rische to sell the New Braunfels saloon and join him on Commerce Street. Their saloon was advertised as Dosch and Rische in the newspapers, but was commonly known as “The Deer Horn Bar”. Décor of the bar was an eclectic mix of German gingerbread woodwork and the ever-increasing collection of Dosch’s abnormal antlers. Folks visiting the city made a point of stopping to gawk at the more than 600 antler specimens on view. They had to pay attention to the unusual closing times though: 8 pm on weekdays and closed all day Sunday.

Dosch was respected by both the Anglo and German communities in San Antonio. He worked on the elections of friends, petitioned the city council for changes in statutes and advocated for new state laws to change deer season to August thru December (for some reason, the law said you could shoot deer from January to July!). Dosch was a charter member of the San Antonio Texanische Schuetzenverein and its president in 1857. He was a frequent prize winner at shooting meets and festivals across the Texas Hill Country. He presented an old rifle to the New Braunfels Schuetzenverein that he had used in the very first German-Texan Shooting festival on July 4, 1849, in New Braunfels.

Ernst was 81 years old when the Deer Horn Bar closed its doors in 1905. The saloon had had a good run, 36 years, and was known as the oldest, continuously owned and open bar in San Antonio at that time. His fantastic antler collection was moved to storage.

Ernst Dosch died in 1906, but his legacy does not end then. In a wonderful quirk of history, Albert and Emile Friederich open a bar in 1896. They, too, love antlers; Emile even makes furniture out of the horns. Their “Buckhorn Saloon” acquired the Dosch antler collection prior to 1920 and added it to its own. The Buckhorn Saloon (and I hope some of Ernst Dosch’s abnormal antlers) lives on and amazes and entertains San Antonio visitors today.

There is one more memorial to Ernst Dosch. When Carl J. Iwonski drew his view of New Braunfels in 1856, he included the figures of Dosch, Dr. Wilhelm Remer and Viktor Bracht. Ernst Dosch is on horseback, looking over the new town of New Braunfels, with his trusty rifle casually laying across his right shoulder. Don’t you just know he is thinking of his next set of antlers?

By the way, you can purchase a great reproduction of Iwonski’s 1856 view of New Braunfels at Sophie’s Shop in the Sophienburg Museum & Archives.

Sources: Neu-Braunfelser Zeitung Collection; Freie Presse für Texas, San Antonio 1880-1906; Galveston Daily News, 1870-1890; “German Businesses of San Antonio”, Dana Pomykal; Indian Wars and Pioneers of Texas, p495; Archives collections: 0009 Haas and 1020 Dressel; Old Town at Conservation Plaza; https://www.americanrifleman.org/content/archives-1892-shooting-fishing-abnormalantlers/; https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook.

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By Keva Hoffmann Boardman —

One of the things I really love about New Braunfels is the way folks have of helping each other and sharing information. I was recently contacted by the New Braunfels Public Library about two children’s books which had been pulled from the library’s general collection. Would the Sophienburg like them? They were by the same author, Fritz Toepperwein. A bell sounded in my crowded brain. Toepperwein? Wasn’t that the author of Little Miss Crinoline? Heck yeah, we want the books!

Ok, I’m a little geeky when it comes to books. I blame my mom. As an elementary school teacher, she taught me to read well before I started school. (A good thing, but it actually contributed to my getting Ds and Fs in deportment.) Both my brother and I can easily waste — no, enjoy — hours of time by reading.

Little Miss Crinoline (1951), was a book we read in school. It’s about a little girl who lives in New Braunfels! She goes through various difficulties, (the result of the teasing of several boy schoolmates) while her mom works at the Schmitz Hotel. The story is set in 1876, and brings early New Braunfels to light in a charming way. The book is only 47 pages long, including the illustrations which are zinc etchings by Fritz Toepperwein’s wife, Emilie. I loved the story as a child, and I just reread it again. And yes, I have a personal copy.

The trip down memory lane triggered an interest in Fritz and Emilie Toepperwein. “Googling” brought little to the surface so I went to the source: Boerne, Texas. It was Fritz’s hometown and he had deep roots there. Conversations with the local experts at the Patrick Heath Public Library led me to vertical files of news clippings and a list of Toepperwein books in the rare book collection. Rare books? Yep, they were only printed once. The Toepperweins had a fervent desire for producing quality children’s books, so they set up their own printing company, The Highland Press, in Boerne. Their books, printed from the 1940s into the 1980s, were meticulously researched and most were completely hand-crafted: hand-cut block and engraved zinc illustrations with hand-colored frontispieces; handset type printed on a hand press one page at a time, hand-gathered, sewn and bound. So far, I’ve come up with a list of 13 books written and illustrated by the two as well as collaborations on at least 11 more books, booklets or newsletters.

Most of the titles reflect the Toepperwein’s passion for Texas history: Little Deputy (1945), Jose and the Mexican Jumping Bean (1965), or I Want To Be a Cowboy (1947). Long-time members of the Texas State Historical Association, Fritz and Emilie were a well-known and respected part of the Texas history crowd. They were reviewers of Texana books for the Southwestern Historical Quarterly. They traveled all over the country talking to groups, selling books to schools and libraries and conducting oral histories. Several of their books were used at the New York Public Library as readers for non-native English speakers.

When the Buckhorn Saloon in San Antonio was acquired by Lone Star Brewing Company in 1957, the Topperweins designed and set up the dioramas and exhibit halls. Years later, working once again for Lone Star, the two designed and led the installation of the Hall of Texas History Wax Museum in the Lone Star Pavillion at Hemisfair ’68. We had season passes for Hemisfair, and going to the Hall of Texas History was one of our favorite spots — that and the guys from Mexico that swung down a pole on ropes after sacrificing a topless lady. The Lone Star Pavilion was free, but it cost 50 cents to go into the wax museum. There were 15 life-size wax dioramas depicting “historical actions” from 1532 onward. Along with exhibits of Sam Houston, the signing of the Texas Declaration of Independence and the invention of barbed wire, there was an exhibit depicting the scalping of a man. I remember it vividly because the horror of it totally fired up some part of my brain.

Early on in their author-illustrator-publisher careers, they encouraged children to write by sponsoring contests like the “Best Letter to Santa Claus Contest” during the 1940s. First open just to Boerne school children, the contest proved so popular that the Toepperweins opened it up to the entire state. In the 1946 contest, thousands of letters flooded into Boerne’s post office; the “St. Nick’s Mailbox” reportedly held a half-ton of letters! What did children ask for? A San Antonio Express article quoted Fritz saying, “anything from imported perfume for an older sister to a new car for Pop … usually, too there was the generous urgent plea, ‘Don’t forget all the other little boys and girls.’”

The Toepperweins regularly authored articles for the Ladies Home Journal as well as an article for the London Times. They wrote and produced several centennial pageants in Texas, including New Braunfels. They also produced the homecomings of Lyndon Johnson in Johnson City, and Dale Evans in Uvalde.

I’m now on a quest to gather up copies of the Toepperwein books. The Sophienburg has three Little Miss Crinoline, Handicraft Printing in Texas (1954) and one phenomenal book, Charcoal and Charcoal Burners, (1950) reprinted for the Texas Sesquicentennial, about cedar chopping along the Guadalupe which I hope share with you in the future.

In 1954, in a presentation to the annual meeting of the Texas State Historical Association, Fritz had this to say:

I will tell you about our humble effort in handicraft publishing in Texas … not visible, but surely there, are the songs of the birds outside our studio windows, as we work over the setting of the type, and the printing of the page. Many nights when it is late, the songs of the night birds filter onto the printed pages and it always makes that particular page mean so much more to us in our books. It is the poetic compensation, which we count for most in our publishing of books at our Highland Press in the green hills of Boerne … We are very certain what we will be doing for years and years to come, and that is this. We love to gather historical data on which we can write a children’s story …

Emilie Toepperwein passed away in 1986 and Fritz left us in 1995. They truly were Texas treasures.

Sources: Fritz Toepperwein Collection, Patrick Heath Public Library, Boerne, Texas; “Handicraft Printing in Texas”: a paper shared at the 54th Annual Meeting of the Texas State Historical Association, 1954.

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