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 —

Legend, lore and local memories hover over this old house. The structure is one of the oldest permanent dwellings in Comal County. Old it is, and certainly old to be so far out of New Braunfels. The current address for the place is 7600 FM 2722. Back in the day it was about 13 miles north out Bear Creek Road on the way to the Sattler. The Sattler community then included Mountain Valley, Walhalla, Hidden Valley and Marienthal.

Exactly when it was built is a mystery. Gottfried Preusser came to Texas in Sept 1845, with wife Louise Busch and five children. His eldest, Johann Georg was old enough to get his own land grant from the German Emigration Company. Did Gottfried build the house? History tells us his next child, Johann Phillip, got married in 1855. One account has Phillip (we will call him that because I get confused since all the sons have Johann as their first name) living in a log cabin and building the house in 1858. Another version states that Phillip and wife Katherine moved in with Gottfried and Louise and “add three rooms to the existing structure.” I found land grants at the Texas General Land Office for Johann Georg and Johann Phillip Preusser for land in the 1860s, some that constituted the Preusser family ranch. There is nothing about Father Gottfried. We don’t even know when Gottfried and Louise died or where they are buried. It is an historical pickle.

What we do know is that the house is a wonderful early example of German building style in Texas. It began as a small 1½ story rectangle, comprised of two rooms made of large squared-off logs put together with rustic dove-tail joints. A porch, first only over the front door, ran along the whole front side and a rock lean-to style kitchen with rock chimney ran along the back side. Originally roofed with cypress shingles, it eventually got a tin roof attached with handmade square nails. It had the typical high pitched-roofline which broke and came over the two additions at a flatter angle. You see this silhouette on quite a few homes around NB and Comaltown. A wooden stairway was attached to the outside of the house to allow access to the ½ story above for storage and sleeping. Know why the staircase was outside the home?

The log walls were chinked and a coating of lime plaster was added to the front wall. The Preussers burned caliche in a lime pit/kiln located nearby and mixed the lime with sand and goat’s milk to make the “whitewash” or plaster coating that was smoothed over the logs.

Later owners included: Pete Nowotny, August Vollmering, and Emma Vollmering Rieber. Emma Rieber, known by many Comal Countians as Tante or Aunt Emma, became closely identified with the Preusser home. By the late 1950s, she was running a sort of café/hunting camp-like-business on the premises. Open on Saturdays and Sundays in the winter, she reserved the right to not open. In fact, she posted a sign on the front door that claimed she had the right to go hunting at any time during deer season. It was reported, “When hearty Emma, who is 58, bags a deer…she hoists it up onto her broad shoulders and carries it from any corner of the 114 acres back to the house.”

In 1961, Tante Emma reopened the rock chimney that had been bricked-up for many years. She kept in place the kitchen utensils that had been hung on pegs and square nails by Phillip and Katherine Preusser. She whitewashed and hand-painted verses and original sayings on the interior walls. One sign discouraged folks from asking for free food or drink by telling them “to seek credit on the second floor of the hotel in the vacant lot.” She was an exceptional cook, a valued friend, and a celebrity of sorts to Ausländer who wrote about her in Houston and San Antonio publications.

A gifted storyteller, she regaled her guests with Preusser family memories — — stories of Indian attacks (“see the arrow points still stuck in the walls?”). Family members have also told stories of Grandma Katherine shooing the children up to the attic via a ladder and trap door in the ceiling of the kitchen when Indians came to steal cattle and horses. They also tell tales of how she made friends with the Indians, trading them fresh-baked bread for ground cornmeal, bear meat, venison and other game.

Katherine’s no-nonsense approach to trouble stands out in family folklore. Phillip had built a cotton gin powered by horses prior to the Civil War. While operating the gin, his left arm below the elbow was crushed. The injury didn’t allow him to join the Confederacy. There were several men in local families who did not side with the South and they went into hiding in nearby caves. Friendship trumped ideology, and Katherine took them food and water. She would also bring them luxuries like soap and hand-spun/woven clothing.

Emma Rieber in many ways embodied Katherine’s true pioneer spirit. She was a unique, witty, strong-minded, self-sufficient, “take -no-_ _ _ _-from-nobody” kind of girl. Born in Comal County, into the large family of an itinerant blacksmith, she chopped cotton in East Texas at age 10. At age 14, she was a skilled blacksmith. She had only a 3rd grade education, but had been taught about the land and nature by her father who had turned the Preusser land into a game preserve.

The home no longer looks like folks my age remember, but it is still back in there behind a wall of trees and a fancy gate. It is totally remodeled but I’m pretty sure that some of those big hand-squared logs still anchor the home to the land and the rich and colorful history of Comal County.

Sources: “Comal County Historical Survey Committee, Pioneer Homes Tour” program for Sunday, Jul 14, 1968; Organized German Settlement and its effects on the Frontier of South-Central Texas, Hubert G. H. Wilhelm, 1968; Preusser Family file, Marjorie Cook collection, New Braunfels Herald and Herald-Zeitung collections.

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