By Tara V. Kohlenberg —

Okay, time for another House story. This House is not a stately manor made of brick, (or straw or wood, nor is it coveted by a wolf). This House is of flesh and blood. Umm, no, not horror movie style. Today’s story is about George House and the property located at North Seguin Avenue and Zink Street. The unassuming little one-story building located on that corner is an office building — now. But it was once a real hoppin’ place, and oh, and the stories it could tell!

George Warren House was born in 1907 in Uvalde, Texas. He and his family lived all over Southeast Texas during his childhood due to his father’s job. He attended school through the 8th grade, leaving to help the family by working whatever jobs he could: chopping cotton, working at filling stations, shooting galleries, dry goods store, bank, and an oil company.

He was really good at his oil company job. While working for the oil company during 1926, he made his first trip to New Braunfels in his Model T. He thought it was the prettiest place he had ever seen. He went to Landa’s Park to swim. He thought the elephant ears lining the banks of the river were beautiful. (Remember, the park was still private property owned by Harry Landa at that time). On another trip through Oklahoma, he met his wife, Rosalea. They were married in 1927. Their daughter, Mary Anne, was born two years later in Houston.

The House family began visiting New Braunfels in 1936. They were taken with the beauty of New Braunfels and visited as frequently as possible. When there was no available accommodation, they would camp across the river from Camp Warnecke (where Scout Hut now stands).

George House worked in oil exploration before working for Dow Chemical in Freeport for 17 years. After more than a decade of camping trips along the Comal River, George and Rosalea might have been some of the first Houstonians to relocate to New Braunfels when they moved here in 1948. They bought a lot on the corner of North Seguin Avenue and Zink Street and built a copper and brass gift manufacturing business. The copper and brass steins, cups, and decorative tray inventory would be loaded into a woody station wagon to sell to retailers across the South under the Steincraft brand.

Metal materials became hard to get when the Korean War broke out in 1950, so they shifted gears. Steincraft gifts expanded to become Steincraft Drive-in Grocery. Their son, George W. House, Jr., “Sonny”, was born in August of 1950, on the day they received their first truckload of groceries from San Antonio.

Although Warnecke’s Drive-in is thought to be the first drive-in grocery in New Braunfels, it and the Steincraft Drive-in Grocery business were the precursors to today’s ice houses and convenience stores like 7-Eleven, Stop-n-Go and Toot-n-Totem.

New Braunfels boasted a population of 12, 210 in 1950. While not big by any means, the city was considered The Beauty Spot of Texas. Visitors traveled from all over to see Landa Park, and the drive-in grocery was located in the best spot ever to sell ice and picnic supplies to them on their way to Landa Park. Steincraft was the perfect tourist stop, be it for ice, picnic supplies, jewelry, or German cuckoo clocks.

About 1952, the House’s daughter, Mary Anne, and son-in-law, Stan Hollmig, became partners. The industrious family expanded their drive-in grocery by adding a kitchen with short orders, on-premise beer license, delicious chicken “fried by two old hens”, and a long carport for drive-in orders (Sonic drive-in style). By June 1956, they renamed the store Stan Hollmig Drive-In, in honor and recognition of their son-in-law, a noted professional baseball player and Houston Astro scout.

George House liked baseball and could talk baseball all day. When Craig and Sonny were old enough to play Little League, Mr. House coached. Stan Hollmig Drive-in sponsored a Little League team from the mid 1950s to at least 1972, modeling good sportsmanship for hundreds of boys. Hollmig’s also participated as an official weigh-in station for the annual deer hunting contests, even when it was still Steincraft Drive-In. Whether about baseball, deer hunting, or politics, you could almost always find a good discussion going on at Hollmig’s,

For the Houses and Hollmigs, it was always about family and community. The Houses built a home adjacent to the drive-in. Mary Anne and Stan Hollmig welcomed a son, Craig, about six months before George House, Jr. “Sonny” House was born. Cheryl Hollmig came along a little later. All three grew up together at the drive-in.

In later years, the Houses changed gears again. They turned their home into an antique business and lived in an old fachwerk home that they had salvaged outside of Gruene. He was definitely a heck of a good House.

Stan Hollmig Drive-In was closed in 1974, and the buildings became the offices of Hollmig Engineering & Surveying. Now, history could be yours. The Hollmig’s office building is currently vacant and available for rent.

Sources: Sophienburg Museum & Archives; Sonny House; Craig Hollmig; Cheryl Hollmig Warnecke.

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By Tara V. Kohlenberg —

In recent days, we have all watched heart-breaking images flash across our screens as Russia exerts its power over Ukraine. News of such events has stirred up childhood memories of my classmates and I scrambling under our metal school desks during bomb drills of the Cold War Era in the ‘50s and ‘60s.

What?! So, in case you have blocked it from memory or are not old enough to know what a Cold War is, let me catch you up. The Cold War was a period of time that began just after World War II and lasted nearly fifty years. Tension rose between the United States and Soviet Union as both countries tried to spread their ideological influence over the world. The threat of nuclear warfare was very present and left its mark on America.

Let’s back up here. So, during WWII, the Russians were on our side helping to defeat Germany, Hitler, and his National Socialist Party. But two years later, Russians become the enemy? Yes, flexing their muscles in politics, in James Bond movies and even in the cartoons. Remember the Russian-like villains Boris and Natasha of Rocky & Bullwinkle who forever attempted to “catch Moose and Squirrel”? — even children were told that the Russians should not be trusted.

In 1949, the Soviet Union detonated its first nuclear device, signaling a new and terrifying phase in the Cold War; umm, that they had what we had and that they could use it on us. By the early 1950s, schools across the United States were training students to dive under their desks and cover their heads. Fears over the escalating arms race prompted President Harry S. Truman’s Federal Civil Defense Administration program to develop the “Duck-and-Cover” school drills and to educate the public about what ordinary people could do to protect themselves. I remember the drills, not so much the name of it.

Every club and organization in New Braunfels had a Civil Defense chairman: the American Legion, PTA groups, Rotary, Lions. etc., to distribute safety preparedness literature and get the word out. Workshops and meetings were held to help educate each family as to how to protect and sustain themselves in the event of an enemy attack. Schools sent home safety plan flyers as to how children would get home to their parents and where to meet them in emergency situations.

In the early 1960s, the U.S.-Soviet arms race really heated up. The disastrous 1961 U.S.-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba failed miserably. Instead of overthrowing Castro, it resulted in stronger ties between Cuba and the USSR putting Russian nuclear missiles in Cuba and the nuclear threat directly in our back yard. The Cuban Missile Crisis was thirteen days of confrontation in the fall of 1962 between the US and Russia that was a true near miss. New Braunfels School District dismissed school early and published the evacuation plans on the front page of the Herald during the ’62 Cuban Missile Crisis.

After that, the country, and New Braunfels, ramped up to protect not just against a bomb, but “The Bomb”. There were bomb shelters in public buildings, like the old City Hall on Seguin Avenue, and a fallout shelter under the police chief’s house. My dad worked for New Braunfels Lumber on the west corner of Castell and Coll (now HMT Engineering). The lumber yard had a personal bomb shelter for sale sitting out in their yard for anyone who could dig a hole deep enough to put it in.

In 1962, New Braunfels received one of 90 packaged hospitals in Texas for use following enemy action or major natural disaster. It was supplied by the office of Civil and Defense Mobilization. The packaged hospitals were outgrowths of the mobile army hospitals used during the Korean War (like on “M*A*S*H”). Most of them were located at least 15 miles from assumed strategic target areas like San Antonio. They were expected to provide at least half of the hospital beds following a major emergency. Let that sink in. Assumed Strategic Target Areas. That means that San Antonio military installations (Kelly Air Force Base, Randolph AFB, Lackland AFB, Fort Sam Houston Army Post, Camp Bullis) and Austin’s Bergstrom AFB, which was actually part of the Strategic Air Command, were strategic targets!! … and New Braunfels would either be the help on the periphery OR collateral damage. Yikes!!

Not only were people worried about protecting people, people were also worried about protecting their stuff. With the world condition being what it was, a group of San Antonio businessmen recognized the need to provide secure vital records storage in case of a nuclear attack. In 1962, they formed Emergency Records Storage, Inc. and built a nuclear-age underground storage facility located in the hill country outside of New Braunfels. It was said to be the only bomb-proof underground vault in a 10-state area which met rigid government specifications. For a fee, the company stored duplicate records in the form of microfilm, magnetic tape, regular hard copies and eventually floppy discs for banks and governmental entities in the event of an attack or disaster. For more than three decades, the records company did a brisk business serving people from Texas and surrounding states. As with most anything, technology grew past the need in the 90s when banks and companies began backing up records on their own computers. Less and less was stored in the vault as the years passed, and the corporation finally dissolved in 2015.

Growing up in New Braunfels during the ‘50s and ‘60s was wonderful even if the world was a scary place. Outside of the “bomb drills” and cartoon references, I was blissfully unaware of most of these things. Growing up now, in a very technologically savvy time, our children may not be. I hope they are as lucky.

Sources: Sophienburg Museum & Archives; New Braunfels Public Library; New Braunfels Herald-Zeitung.

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Keva Hoffmann Boardman —

When nine young men from Frankfort emigrated to Texas in 1849, they were given the nickname of “Die Neunköder” or “the Nine Lures” or “the Niners.” One of them, George Weber, described the group of adventurers:

“Taking a sailship at Antwerpen, we finally landed at Indianola after a 57-days voyage…after a four-weeks trip reached our destination New Braunfels shortly before Christmas 1849. We were a group of nine who in jest were called “die Neunköder”. After a number of trips into the surrounding country in its yet primitive state, we bought 400 acres of raw land on the left bank of the Guadalupe between New Braunfels and Seguin and began early 1850 to put it into cultivation. It soon proved that our plan “one for all and all for one” was a miserable failure. Ability, views, skills, etc…, are so dissimilar apportioned. And so after 4-months of labor it was decided to sell the land and each go his own way…”

Tradition has it that the nine bachelors first worked for Jacob de Cordova at his home, Wanderer’s Retreat (south of present day Clear Springs), before they bought 400 acres from him and named their new community Neu Frankfort. Hermann Seele named all but one of them in his Gesammelte Schriften: J. August and Ferdinand Michael Dietz, J. Halm, Rudorf, Behr (or Boer), Buss, Heinrich Bauer, and George Weber. Oscar Haas thought possible names for the ninth “lure” might be Fertsch, Deisler, Grossmann or Meimoro.

After the collapse of their communal farm project, the Dietz brothers bought out Bauer, Behr, and Buss and by 1853, the community was known as Dietz. Oddly enough, two of my dad’s ancestors, Johahn Phillip and Jacob Stautzenberger, bought some of August Dietz’s land in 1861 and 1871.

I started following up on George Weber and found out that in 1869 he invented a machine to clean castor beans. He then set up the first castor oil mill in our area in 1870. He sold the oil as a medicine and a lubricant. Ok, now I have to know more about castor oil. I remember my mom saying they had to take spoonfuls of castor oil as kids. Just what is it and why did they have to take it?

Humans have harvested and used the castor plant for 7000 years. Castor oil (known as kiki by the ancient Greeks) was an early commercial product used by many ancient cultures as a medicine, lamp fuel, in wick-making, leather lubrication, fabrics, and varnish. Egyptians used castor oil to prevent eye irritations. It was used in India as a laxative. The Chinese used it both internally and externally in medical treatments. You can find it mentioned in the Book of Jonah in the Bible. Folks in the middle ages used the oil for its skin healing properties. Travelling salesman of the 19th C hawked castor oil mixed with as much as 40% alcohol as a cure for many things including heartburn, constipation and to induce labor.

The castor plant (Ricinus communis) is a perennial shrub which grows between 6’-8’. Dorothy Kypfer Constable, a staff member at the Sophienburg, brought me some seed pods from a wild castor plant growing on the Kypfer Farm out past the NB Airport and in the area of the old Dietz community. The seeds or beans, encased in spiny pods, are silky smooth and shiny grey to brown in color with intricate mottled designs. They actually look a little like cow ticks.

The plant contains three poisons so it is classified as a toxic plant. You think? The seeds contain about 50% oil by weight. The poison lectin is extracted from the seeds during the oil-making process. We’ve all heard of terrorists using ricin, right? Well, this is where it comes from!

There is science behind the use of the castor bean oil. Castor oil contains a high amount of ricinoleic acid, a fatty acid that is the source of its healing properties. It prevents bacteria and virus growth by increasing white blood cells and antibodies. Rub it on arthritic joints and it increases blood circulation to those areas. Castor oil also contains salts and ethers which act as skin conditioners and it can assist the body in expelling toxins.

Grandmas and moms don’t sound so mean now for making kids take the oil, do they? The seemingly cruel doling out of castor oil, was really doing a lot of good. If you were constipated, it was a laxative. If you had PMS, it helped absorb hormones. It also strengthened your body’s viral and bacterial resistance by increasing the production of lymphocytes.

Today, people are using this ancient homeopathic medicine to treat skin infections — – its antifungal, antibacterial properties remove toxins and reduce swelling. It fights acne — – it kills bacteria that causes breakouts and hydrates the skin. It relieves arthritis — – used as a massage oil, its anti-inflammatory properties ease pain in joints and muscles. And it promotes healthy hair growth — – its omega-6 acids help hair grow and give it shine.

Castor oil also has the ability to “cling” to very hot moving parts so it is utilized in high performance engines (Castrol-R). It was used extensively in WWI, WWII and Korea in hydraulic fluids, greases and lubricants for military equipment. Castor oil is added to paints and varnishes to help them dry faster, and it is a basic ingredient in the making of nylon and other synthetic resins and fibers. The castor plant is currently being researched as a product plant to use in rotation with cotton and studies are testing its use as a biofuel.

Cool beans, right? Just be aware that It grows wild in our area and remember, the castor bean plant is poisonous.

Sources: Neu Braunfelser Zeitung and New Braunfels Herald newspaper collections – Sophienburg Museum & Archives; The New Braunfels Sesquicentennial Minutes, ed. Roger Nuhn, 1995; Edna Faust and Oscar Haas collections — Sophienburg Museum & Archives; www.tshaonline.org; www.dovebiotech.com; The Agriculturist, “The Perfect Storm”, Fall 2011; FarmProgress, “Castor an oilseed crop that can cure, kill you”, Oct 9, 2012.

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