What is under about 100 feet of water in Canyon Lake? Or better still, what would still be there if the lake had not been constructed?

I started looking and found out: ranch land, farm land, trees, cemeteries, Guadalupe River and the site of two very small communities, Hancock and Cranes Mill.

Plans for the improvement of the Guadalupe River Water Shed by building a dam go as far back as 1929. A survey was made in 1935 and was authorized 10 years later. Four sites were considered, with the one chosen 21 miles from New Braunfels. Construction began in 1960, and by 1964 when the gates were finally closed, the lake began to fill.

With a shoreline of 80 miles, reservoir storage was estimated at 740,900 acre feet. Total cost of the project was around $20.2 million, with about $3 million more than projected due to road work and north and south access roads (source: Alton Rahe’s “History of Sattler and Mountain Valley School”).

Some 500,000 cubic yards of material were hauled to the dam site out of a rock quarry owned by Roland and Gladys Erben. In a Reflections tape made for the Sophienburg, they said holes were drilled with air hammers. The holes were filled with ammonium nitrate and set off with a dynamite charge, causing 5,000 pounds of rock blasting each time.

Now under water, the small settlement of Hancock would be there. It was named after the land’s original owner, John Hancock, who in 1851 was granted the land on the north bank of the Guadalupe River.

Eventually, Frank Guenther acquired the land and established a store and opened a Post Office in 1916. This Post Office was closed in 1934 and, according to Oscar Haas, the population of Hancock in 1940 was 10.

Frank Guenther was one of the children of Christian Guenther, one of the orphans raised by the Ervendbergs at the Weisenhaus (orphanage). Christian Guenther came from Germany with his parents and his three siblings in 1845. His mother and two siblings died aboard ship and his father died in Texas in 1847, leaving 8-year-old Christian as an orphan. As an adult, Christian settled in Sattler, raised a family of six children, one of which was Frank Guenther (source: Brenda Anderson Lindeman’s “Spring Branch”).

The other community under Canyon Lake would be Cranes Mill. James Crain established a cypress shingle mill in the 1850s along the Guadalupe. Notice the spelling which changed from “Crain” to “Crane” after the Civil War.

My neighbor Olive Marcelle Hofheinz, is the g-granddaughter of a very well-known man in the Cranes Mill area, the Rev. August Engel. Engel arrived in Texas in 1846 and came to New Braunfels where he married his wife and then moved to the area known as Luckenbach.

They began that General Merchandising Store that we know. It was his home and they named Luckenbach after their son-in-law.

The Engels moved to Cranes Mill in 1870, there opening a store and establishing a Post Office he ran for 31 years. But Engel had another calling: He was a circuit-riding preacher in the river valley, Rebecca Creek, Cranes Mill, Twin Sisters and sometimes in New Braunfels. His wife was a midwife. The two of them performed many services for all the people in the area.

In 1890 August Engel’s son, August W. Engel, took over the store and the Post Office and remained there until 1935. Marcelle Hofheinz remembers Cranes Mill Post Office.

The Post Office was in the center of the store and it was enclosed in fine mesh wire, protecting cornmeal and flour from mice.

When Canyon Dam was being constructed over a six-year period, my husband Glyn drove our family of three children to the North Park overlook and took slides at least three times a month. After that, we would go to the Roland Erben ranch to look for rocks. Rock hunting became a lifelong hobby for all of us.

As for Glyn’s slides, you can view them detailing the construction of Canyon Dam by visiting http://www.co.comal.tx. us/CCHC.htm.

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By Keva Hoffmann Boardman —

Who invented the cotton gin?

Many of you learned the answer to this question in elementary school. If you said “Eli Whitney” you are correct, but like me, back then you really didn’t understand that the invention of the cotton gin revolutionized the American economy and made cotton a major industry.

Thanks to Whitney’s invention in 1793, cotton no longer had to be “ginned” by hand although cotton was still picked by hand well into the 1940s. There are 15–20 bolls on each cotton plant and 27–45 seeds in each boll. That’s a lot of seeds that need to be separated from the cotton fiber. The cotton gin mechanically separated the seeds and fiber by rolling the cotton through wooden rollers covered with metal hooks that caught at the fiber and pulled it through a mesh. Cotton seeds were too big to go through the mesh and fell into a hopper below. A person could hand-gin one pound of cotton in one day; Whitney’s technology processed 50 pounds of cotton in a day.

Cotton was first grown in Comal County by German immigrants in 1852. The non-slave-holding Mittendorf brothers planted and harvested cotton enough for nine bales. William H. Meriwhether had built a water-powered grist and sawmill using the Comal Springs in 1847. He later added a flour mill and cotton gin. Meriwhether ginned the Mittendorf boys’ cotton for 1½ cents per pound. Francis Moreau shipped the nine bales through Indianola to New Orleans for an additional 1½ cents per pound. The bales were graded “middling fair” and sold for 10½ cents per pound. Cotton proved a profitable undertaking for the Mittendorfs who got 7½ cents per pound for their efforts.

In 1857, F. B. Hoffmann set up the first horse-powered cotton gin in the county out at Four Mile Creek/Solms. Later in 1870, Hoffmann was also the first to convert his gin to steam power; he advertised that he could “gin 6 bales a day” with the new technology.

In 1863, Erhard Mittendorf built a gin near the Austin Hill Community, and in 1875, George Webber operated his cotton gin and oil mill in downtown New Braunfels just one block off Main Plaza on North Seguin Street. And you thought the silos of the Co-op looked rural.

By the 1880s and 1890s, cotton gins were features in many of the small communities and settlements that peppered Comal County. They were usually known by the owner’s name:

• H. D. Gruene – Goodwin
• Gus Reinarz (formerly Hoffmann’s) – Solms
• John Marbach – Bracken
• August G. Startz – Smithson Valley
• Reinarz & Marbach – Danville
• Charles Knibbe – Spring Branch
• Hunter Gin Co. – Hunter
• Fischer’s – Fischer’s Store
• Hermann Guenther – Sattler
• Frank Guenther – Hancock
• Ludwig Haag and Gustav Schmidt gins – Bulverde
• Farmers Union – Hortontown
• Oberkampf’s and Flugrath’s gins – Cranes Mill
• Reinarz & Knoke, Landa Milling and Faust & Co. gins – New Braunfels

This is a partial list, but it shows the importance of having area gins for the many farmers who grew cotton across the county.

Sadly, only a few of the cotton gin structures or ruins still exist today. However, a notable example is still visible at Eight Mile Creek/Comal Settlement off Old Nacogdoches Road. From the road you can see the beautiful brick Friesenhahn Cotton Gin and Corn Sheller building with its stately, very tall smoke stack which signified it was steam-powered. The gin was constructed by Andreas Friesenhahn in the early 1890s, but it was not the first gin constructed by Friesenhahns. An earlier gin was built by Andreas and his two brothers, Jacob and Nicholas, in the 1880s. This building included the first commercial corn sheller in the area as well. The gin was located on a site near the sharp corner of Old Nacogdoches Road just north of the old Kneupper Store. It burned down in 1899 causing Jacob and Nicholas to get out of the ginning business. FYI: Cotton is very flammable and can spontaneously combust. Trailers full of rain-wet cotton and stored piles of unginned cotton can ignite in the center and burn inside-out setting fire to other trailers and the cotton gin itself.

Andreas Friesenhahn continued on and built a new gin and corn sheller soon after the fire. This is the structure we can see today. He ran the business through the early 1900s and then deeded the gin, corn sheller, seed house and cotton yard to his three sons Gregor, Jacob and Ferdinand. They operated the place under the “Friesenhahn Brothers Gin” name. Gregor left the company in 1923. The cotton market nose-dived in the 1940s, and the gin closed. After the death of Jacob in 1946, Ferdinand’s wife Mathilda and son Roman bought the structure and continued to run the corn shelling operation until 1959.

In a 1986 oral history recording in the Sopheinburg Museum collections, Vivian Zipp, a native of the Solms/Comal Settlement area, reflected on the Friesenhahn Brothers Gin:

The Friesenhahn Brothers Cotton Gin and Corn Sheller was owned by Jacob, Gregor and Ferdinand Friesenhahn. It was located close to the Katy railroad. A spur line was laid from the main tracks to the cotton gin and corn sheller…you could see box cars loaded with shelled corn, ginned cotton bales and bales of corn shucks. The farmers would use the shucks to feed their cattle. They had a warehouse close to the spur where bales of corn shucks were stored when boxcars were filled or not available for shipping…. At the peak of the season [August through December] the wagons of cotton and wagons of corn were lined up from each direction — from the west on the San Antonio–Austin highway, from the east on the San Antonio-Austin highway and to the south on Friesenhahn Lane — with waiting wagons taking cotton to be ginned and corn to be shelled [There was no IH-35 back then, so the San Antonio–Austin Road went straight through the middle of Solms]. There were many nights that you could hear the cotton gin and corn sheller running into the wee hours of the morning until every farmer had unloaded. Sometimes as many as 50 wagons from each direction were waiting in line.

The Friesenhahn gin and corn sheller stands empty and quiet now. I love the big old yellowish brick building whose smoke stack still towers over the landscape. What stories can it tell of those first farming families who lived there for generations, working the land, gathering with friends, going to church and pitching in when disaster hit one of their friends or family? What can it tell us about the character of the people and times it shadowed in its heyday? Drive by, take a moment —and listen.

Sources: Sophienburg Museum: Neu Braunfelser Zeitung collection; Oscar Haas collection; Reflections Oral History collection; and “Comal Texas”, a research project of the Comal Settlement Association and Schertz Historical Preservation Committee.

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