Step into the past this coming Saturday and Sunday at the Folkfest put on by the Heritage Society at the Heritage Village on Churchhill Drive. The whole event kicks off with the annual children’s masked parade, known as Kindermasken (children’s masks) or the old way, Kindermaskenball (children’s masked dance). Doesn’t New Braunfels just love parades?

Children like to dress up and parade around and they were doing this in Germany long before the settlers came here in 1845. The immigrants brought the tradition with them and supposedly Hermann Seele organized the local event here in 1857. The reason for children parading goes way back too. Children represent new life and Spring represents a new year. Although it has changed over the years, the tradition lives on.

“Kindermaskenball: Past and Present” written by Rosemarie Leissner Gregory and Myra Lee Adams Goff can be purchased at the Sophienburg. The book illustrates, through photographs, the changes in the tradition from the beginning to the 1920s, the war years and up to the present.

This year children are asked to line up at 9:15 Saturday around the Main Fire Station and march towards the Plaza then to First Protestant Church. Two NBISD middle school bands will march. (Parade participants are invited to Folkfest where judging of costumes will be held. Each will receive one pass and one adult pass)

This is the 27th Folkfest put on by the Heritage Society. The setting at the Village is perfect with its beautiful wildflowers and historic buildings. There is something for everyone and especially children.

Ladies, this is what you can experience: Imagine getting up early to feed and milk the goats and feed the chickens. You fix biscuits in a small cottage that could easily be 100 degrees inside. Why do they taste better than canned biscuits? Now you sit down and make lace for the one dressy dress that you own. Look how the handwork is piling up. Let the kids help you wash clothes in a wash tub using lye soap on an old wooden scrub board. By the way, the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, Ferdinand Lindheimer Chapter, will be there to help you with your genealogy. Were your ancestors in Texas during the Republic?

There is plenty for you men to do. First there is a chuck wagon cooking demonstration. That will come in handy when you make biscuits, cobbler and stew outside. Go by the Texian tents where the re-enactors are camping out. There are also Civil War re-enactors. What a show they put on with their canons that they really do fire. How about learning about native plants and you might as well learn how to make adobe bricks. The blacksmith demo is really interesting since I’ll bet not too many of you do that any more.

Now comes the real highlight of Folkfest, children’s activities. Kids, you can learn how to make a kite and then most important how to fly it. Of course there are the old favorites, candle dipping and the making of clay pots or whatever. You can learn how to make arrowheads and play games like sack races, hoops and graces, lassoing and stick pony races. There’s a bird feeding activity where you make a bird feeder using peanut butter. And for you little girls, you can dress up (clothes provided) and go to a real tea party.

On Sunday, Ravenstar will teach you how to identify birds and the Gorge Preservation Group of Canyon Lake will have an archeological dig and just maybe you will find a little dinosaur.

Both days there will be entertainment like Ballet Folklorico and Kindertanzen. There will be music and food of all sorts. You can see things like snakes. No, they won’t just be crawling around, they will be caged. You can shop for antiques and collectibles and tour the buildings on the grounds. What a great way to learn about the past and have fun at the same time.

All of our historical museums like Heritage, Sophienburg, Conservation, Railroad, plus the County and City Historical groups are doing such a good job of keeping our history alive. Hats off to them all!

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By Keva Hoffmann Boardman –

If you’ve ever looked at the mural “Lure of the Springs” on the Parks and Rec building in Landa Park, you will find it includes a mammoth. The Sophienburg has several prehistoric artifacts and one of them is a mammoth tooth. Cool. I wondered where it was found, who found it and when. Time for a mammoth quest!

Many of our early German founders were highly educated; they had attended university and studied a wide range of sciences. Dr. Samuel Geisser, professor of biology at SMU, did an extensive survey of early Texas naturalists in the 1930s which includes a large number of our founders.

Quite a few of these men had scientific study collections that they shared with the local community and even the world (think of Lindheimer whose herbaria made it back to Europe). Others had “curiosity” collections — – collections of Native American stone points or pretty seashells or weird bugs or maybe even of hairballs or two-headed goats in jars of formaldehyde. You and I make collections like this (maybe not of two-headed goats) and so it was that prehistoric bones, when discovered, made their way into the collections of people in NB.

How did they find them? In a lot of cases, mammoth and other mammal remains were unearthed during the digging of wells. Several men were known as Brunnenmacher or Brunnengräber or well-diggers prior to 1900: H. Guenther, J.H. Petri and R. Sands. They dug wells for $1.50 per foot of depth and guaranteed they would find you water or your money back. Many backyards in the downtown area have these remarkable wells. We have old fire insurance maps in the museum’s collections that show their locations.

The first published account of prehistoric bones was in June 1856. While digging a well “on Lister’s lot”, an almost complete skeleton of a mammoth was unearthed. The shinbones alone were 43 inches long and 17 inches thick. The vertebrae were roughly 15”x13”. Tusks were 9 feet in length. The animal was discovered at a depth of 18 feet in sandy light grey clay. It was supposedly sent to the Smithsonian Institution (there is a snide remark about the Texas Legislature not taking measures to secure its own treasures) but I haven’t verified that. It seems this really fantastic find was also written up by an English periodical, The Geologist, in 1861. Look at NB making international news!

In 1941, biologist Dr.Geisser had local historian Oscar Haas try to trace down some more information on this outstanding early find. Haas contacted C. A. Jahn and received this answer:

“The early residents of N.Brfls did get water for household purposes from the Comal or Springs entering the Comal river. This was inconvenient and most every family did try to find water by digging a well or having a well dug on their premises. There were men who made it their business to dig wells about 35 ft deep five feet in diameter walled with lime rock. By digging these wells they unearthed a large head of a fossil mammal. They also found in other parts of the city limits large bones of some monster, the head and bones were found in a sandy loam strata. The head about three feet long by two &1/2 feet wide, about two feet thick was for several years lying near the entrance door of August Forcke’s Drug Store. The head and bones when exposed to the air peeled off what has finally become of them I do not know”

Mr. Jahn would have been 5 years old at the time of the big find. His answer is interesting because it fits in with later fossil discoveries. His “large head of a fossil mammal” might refer to the bones of a huge prehistoric animal found at a depth of 30 feet by men digging a well for Balwin Behring in Jan 1873. The find of “large bones of some monster” could have been the 1890 discovery on Heinrich Kellermann Sr.’s farm on the east side of the Guadalupe of a type of “dinosaur lizard which was a plant eater and lived in water most of the time.” The tooth was brought to the NB Zeitung office and according to their research, they determined it came from a 30-foot animal.

I really like that this “monster” find was displayed in front of Forcke’s Drug Store for everyone to marvel at. I can just see the bleach-white bones of the behemoth peeling under the hot Texas sun. I also wonder if bits and pieces of the skeletal remains didn’t find their way secretly into the homes of other New Braunfelsers.

In July 1866, a tooth was found while digging a well on Mr. George Schmitt’s lot at a depth of 34 feet just above blue clay or marl. When an eight-pound mammoth tooth was found in Sippel’s gravel quarry in 1895, Otto Heilig put it in his “curiosity” collection and invited the public to come take a look. In June 1905, Jack Horne and friends were picnicking on the banks of the Guadalupe River near “the Elsner place” and found parts of an enormous skull protruding from the riverbank.

Here’s a find location you will know. In July 1915, Peter Nowotny, Jr., “had a sink dug at the Prinz Solms Hotel” and at a depth of 25 feet was found the three-foot thighbone of a mastodon. In 1920, Louis Staats brought a very large mastodon tooth into town that workers had dug up on Post Road near Watson School. The newspaper men got a little silly and reported, “Toothache in such a tooth must have been immense. We are glad that our wisdom teeth are not that big or that the dentist has to fill them with gold.”

Teeth and bones of adult and infant mammoths were found by A.M. Fiedler in late November 1920 in a gravel excavation near Landa Park. Dr. Fiedler found many fossils and bones which he kept in his quite extensive geological collections displayed at his home and at his office at the Comal County Courthouse. He regularly shared these with boy scouts, high school science students and interested groups. A part of his collection remains at Texas Lutheran University.

By the way, the Sophienburg’s mammoth tooth was dug out of the bank of the Comal Creek by Albert Nowotny. He donated it to the museum when we opened in 1933.

Sources: Neu Braunfelser Zeitung and NB Herald collections – Sophienburg Museum & Archives; The Houston Weekly Telegraph, July 30, 1856; The Geologist, 1861, “On a Fossil Elephant in Texas”, George E. Roberts ed. By S.J. Mackie, London; Field and Laboratory, “Collectors of Pleistocene Vertebrates in Early Texas, by S.W. Geiser, Vol 13(2): 53-60; Oscar Haas collection – Sophienburg Museum & Archives.

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