Thanks to some early settlers, we have pictures painted with words of what early NB looked like from writers like Roemer, Lindheimer, Brach and the most prolific of all writers, Hermann Seele. Let’s not forget all those personal letters that were saved by families.

One of the best descriptions of the early Mission Valley area was written by Wilhelm (Bill) Adams, the older brother of my grandfather, Louis Adams. In 1937 Bill Adams told his story to his son, Harold Adams, who fortunately for us all, typed Bill’s story as he was speaking.

The paper was copied in its entirety in Alton Rahe’s book, “History of Mission Valley Community”. Excerpts from that paper bear repeating.

Bill Adams and my grandfather Louis were sons of Heinrich and Katarina Doeppenschmidt Adams. Katarina’s father was Jacob Doeppenschmidt, Sr. whose ranch was in the Honey Creek area. Heinrich’s ranch was in the Mission Valley. Both families were ranchers from the beginning. Honey Creek Ranch is now under the care of the Texas Parks and Wildlife.

Heinrich Adams, as a single man, came to Texas and New Braunfels in 1850 from Prussia. A family tradition states that Heinrich was educated in Germany and was in an elite military unit – elite because one had to be over six feet tall to be eligible. That was tall for Europeans in those days. Supposedly he had to leave Germany because he hit an officer. In 1856 he married Katarina Doeppenschmidt, daughter of Jacob and Anna Marie Doeppenschmidt. There were six children; my grandfather was the youngest.

In 1894 after both Heinrich and Katarina had died, second son Bill bought the ranch from his sisters and brothers. My grandfather, Louis, being a minor, went to live with his uncle, Jacob Doeppenschmidt,Jr. Bill was a successful rancher and eventually expanded the ranch to 1100 acres.

Bill was also involved in politics. He served as a Deputy Sheriff and then Comal County Commissioner for eight years and then was elected Sheriff and Tax Collector in 1908-1920. (Source of above by Marilyn Thurman and Jane Brummet, granddaughters of Bill Adams).

Bill’s paints a word picture of the early Mission Valley area. At one time there were no fences and sedge grass was as high as a horse “waving in the wind like waves of the ocean” with no brush and cedar and an occasional live oak. The game was deer, wild hogs, wild turkeys, javelinas, geese, ducks, swans, pelicans, flamingos, wild pigeons (an extinct bird sometimes referred to as the wandering dove because it would drift south in the winter and return in the spring.) There were panthers, various wolves, coyotes, bears, leopards, wild cats, raccoons, opossums, ringtail civet cats, skunks, armadillos and other smaller animals.

Farming in the area started when the settlers arrived and they needed tanks and waterholes. This explains all the types of waterfowl. The most remarkable of all the watering places was the Post Oak Sea, a mile from Adams’ ranch house. It was a large body of water never known to go dry until 1887 and since then held water for only a short time following a series of heavy rains. When all other watering holes were dry and the Guadalupe was down to a trickle, this large body of water was full. If you want to see it, drive out Hwy. 46 and from the intersection of Loop 336, on the right side about four miles, you will see a large tank near the road. That’s not it! Drive a little further and off in the distance you will spot the “Sea” with a small amount of water. Speculations about the “Sea” going dry have gone on for years; some thought there was an earthquake, some felt it had to do with a storm in 1886.

“We young fellows from our neighborhood would get together at the Sea all on horseback with several trained dogs, and waited for the wild hogs to come to the water. The lake was several acres across and a mile in every direction. Good rodeos would take place there between the dogs and hogs.”

Other Bill Adams stories are reprinted in Rahe’s book that can be purchased at the Sophienburg.

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“Have you heard? Old Squire Moeschen is dead!” So begins Hermann Seele’s narrative of a murder here in New Braunfels in 1855. Seele spun this true, gruesome tale in his book, “Die Cypress” available at Sophie’s Shop.

Here’s the background: Christof Moeschen, born in 1806 in Thuringia, came to Texas along with his wife Johanna, and a nine-year-old daughter, Friederike. The year was 1844. Seele says their small log cabin built in 1845 was on the Comal Creek and consisted of one room and a porch surrounded by a fence of cedar posts.

For all one knew, the family of three lived a quiet life, but all that changed in 1854 when the Moeschen’s only child, Friederike, married the shoemaker Carl Riebeling. The mother approved of the son-in-law, but the father did not. Hermann Seele had actually performed the wedding and the young couple lived with her parents. Unaccustomed to outdoor work, Riebeling became sick. Moeschen believed the son-in-law was just lazy.

When a baby was born to the young couple and died, Moeschen was so distraught about the death that any harmony that had come about because of the baby disappeared. Moeschen became abusive towards his family. The daughter no longer loved her father. She resented his abusiveness towards her mother and husband. As a result, Mrs. Moeschen and the Riebeling couple contrived a plot to get rid of the old man.

On the day of the murder in early September, 1855, the father returned home exhausted, called his son-in-law a loafer and then fell asleep in a drunken stupor. In the dark of evening, the daughter provided a light, and her husband and mother killed the old man with an ax. All that could be heard was the autumn wind wafting the withered leaves from the trees and a few raindrops.

The mother laid the father whom she said was “kaput” on a mattress and sewed him into a bedspread so that no one could see him. The ax was dropped to the bottom of a pond formed by the creek.

Day dawns. Outside, Mrs. Moeschen called to her neighbor G. Holzmann a laborer going to work. She tells him her husband has died and gives him a string to give to Gerhard who is to make the funeral arrangements. The string is the length of the body.

Gerhard went to the Moeschen home to make some arrangements and asked to look at the body. The family refused because they said he had already been sewed into a shroud. Upon returning to town, Gerhard said to Justice of the Peace Hermann Seele that he was suspicious and Seele called for a coroner’s inquest because of the sudden death.

Funeral arrangements continued and friends began to arrive at the house for the funeral. Present were Pastor Eisenlohr of the German Protestant Church where the family were members, the choral society, many townspeople and the carriage with the empty coffin. .

Inside the inquest was performed.. The corpse was unwrapped from a dark brown checkered bedspread (shroud) and then carried outside and put on a large table. Drs. Remer and Koester prepared for an autopsy. (Yes, right there) Since it was getting dark, lanterns had to be brought from town. After the autopsy, it was determined “The old man has been murdered. Arrest the people.” The three family members were put under arrest.

Through the dark woods, a ghastly procession carrying the casket, proceeded to the sheriff’s home in town. In the Spring of 1856, the trial found all three guilty punishable by imprisonment with hard labor for nine years each.

Additional information to Seele’s narrative was written by Everett Fey in his research about the First Founders of New Braunfels. Volunteer Tom Call researched the trial and found that Johanne Moeschen died in prison and that Friedrike was paroled in 1860 and Carl Riebeling paroled in 1862.

Picture this: The funeral is at the home, the body is brought outside under a tree, an autopsy is performed right there and all the while, family, friends, jury, doctors, singing society are all witness to the whole macabre scene. Forensic science has come a long way.

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By Keva Hoffmann Boardman —

I recently found a note in Oscar Haas’s archive collection, “Zeitung, Thursday, July 6, 1899. Use story some time concerning a jailbreak.” He never published the story.

I felt like he was “speaking from the grave” and I should look into it.

The first purpose-built Comal County Jail was a log structure constructed at the location of the current Elks Lodge’s parking lot on South Seguin Street. It was used until 1854, when a new jail was built at what is now 509 W. Mill St.

The earliest reported jailbreak in the New Braunfels Zeitung was from the Mill Street jail in February 1859. The prisoner, William D. Harris, had committed a brutal murder in Seguin. Eight days prior to the escape, the sheriff heard unusual sounds from the cell. Opening the door, he discovered that Harris had broken free of his chains and that an attempt had been made to break through the cell wall, from both the inside and the outside, with a crowbar and a file. Two men were put on constant guard outside the building. At 11 p.m. on the night of the breakout, about 15 men on horseback descended on the jail and broke the boards and one lock of the two oak doors. The chain and cuffs attached to prisoner Harris were broken off with a heavy hammer.

Don’t know if Harris was ever caught. That’s research for another time.

In 1866, a suspected horse thief and another prisoner attempted an escape by creating a hole in the cell wall. Fortunately, the sheriff arrived before the hole was big enough for the escapees. The two men were put in irons.

An extremely inventive jailbreak was attempted in July of 1874. Two prisoners used the bacon they had been given for supper to grease and set fire to the heavy oak planks of the door that separated their cells. One of the escapees got through and began working to make a hole in the outer jail wall. The second man began coughing from the smoke and got stuck in the burned opening. Prisoner One soon went back and pulled his comrade through. The process scraped quite a lot of skin from the man’s torso; he refused to help make the second hole in the outer wall. Daylight brought the sheriff and ended their creative jailbreak.

Eventually, the Mill Street jail proved inadequate both in size and reliability. In 1879, a new two-story cut-limestone jail was erected behind the 1860 Comal County Courthouse (located where the Chase Bank building is on Main Plaza). This jail was built with an iron roof and doors and cost the county about $10,000; it could hold 20-30 prisoners.

Crime must have been on the rise.

In a humorous, Andy Griffith-like moment, a prisoner escaped from the brand-new jail by simply walking out of his unlocked cell and through an unguarded front door. He was caught later across the bridge in Comaltown. The editors of the newspaper printed the question, “Why don’t we close the doors?”.

The year 1866 saw another jailbreak. James Alexander, incarcerated for the involuntary manslaughter of Walter Krause, simply disappeared from the jail. On the morning of the escape, he was heard playing his flute. When lunch was brought in to him, he was gone. The sheriff, who was in Seguin at the time of the jailbreak, located Alexander in San Antonio the next day. The newspaper never shared how the jailbreak was accomplished.

Now the 1899 story that motivated me to check out this subject. The Neu Braunfels Zeitung article is quite tongue-in-cheek.

Three prisoners escaped from “our break-in and escape-proof county prison” in the wee hours of the morning when the sheriff was away. The men had not been sentenced so were not locked in a cell. Having freedom to move in the corridor between the cells and the prison wall, they managed to fashion an axe with a piece of iron attached to a broken broom handle. With this implement, and the use of a water hose used to clean the cells, the three “very cleverly” used the water hose to soften the mortar and then scrape it away so that the stones of the wall could be pulled in or pushed out without much effort. The last paragraph is priceless:

“These guys really deserve recognition for their job. They probably didn’t want the free room and board from the County any longer… But rumor has it that the intelligent escapees, after celebrating July 4th outdoors, will want free quarters and will decide to break into the prison again. However, all precautionary measures have been taken to prevent this…”

I do love a journalist with a wicked sense of humor.

The 1879 limestone jail was replaced by an addition to the Comal County Court­house in 1931, although it wasn’t torn down until 1958. I found several references to jail­breaks from this newest jail. A rather spec­tac­ular one occurred in 1963. Two prisoners joined forces and escaped via a large steel trapdoor to the third-floor roof. The trap­door was chained to a steel ladder which was bolted to the concrete ceiling of the jail. The two prisoners worked the large steel bolts out of the concrete enough to slide the ladder and trapdoor over to give them space to escape. From the roof, they used an angled corner of the court­house to climb down the rock face to the roof of the first floor. There, they connected a rope made from two blankets and a jacket to the downspout of the gutter. Once on the ground they each went their own way. The other jail inmates said the breakout occurred around 9:45 p.m. The jail­break was not discovered until morning at 8:30 a.m. by a passer­by who saw the blankets fluttering on the building and informed the jailer. The alarm was sounded and by 9 a.m., one of the fugitives was rearrested at his home in Comaltown. The other, who had served time for murder, had been waiting to be trans­ferred to Mexico by immigrat­ion authorities. It is thought he may have made his way home on his own.

Thanks for the nudge, Mr. Haas. It really did need to be used in a story.

(“Around the Sophienburg” is published every other weekend in the New Braunfels Herald-Zeitung.)

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(Encore presentation — Originally appeared February 8, 2011)

By Myra Lee Adams Goff

Waggoners or Teamsters were important to early New Braunfels. They not only led the wagon trains of the early German settlers but they hauled freight to and from the frontier, especially the Gulf coast.

G. Fred Oheim, editor of the Zeitung’s Jahrbuch in 1943, named 340 teamsters who “transported merchandise to New Braunfels from Indianola, Lavaca, Victoria, Cuero, Kingsbury, Luling, Marion, Austin and San Antonio from 1860 to1877 for Ernst Sherff alone.”

Sherff was owner of a large merchandise business in New Braunfels that he purchased from Ferguson and Hessler in 1858. By that time, Waggoners were using mules to pull wagons. Sherff’s store later became Eiband and Fischer.

Oheim related that when there were no factories in Texas providing necessities of life and the state’s wealth consisted solely of produce off the land, transportation was an indispensable part of daily living.

Early Texas transportation consisted of ox-drawn wagons, then stagecoaches and finally railroads. One group started to build a railroad from San Antonio to Lavaca but the tracks were destroyed at Victoria during the Civil War.

In 1865-66, the U.S. Army placed that stretch in operation again. Before and after the Civil War and up until a hurricane wiped out Indianola in 1886, oxen and mule wagons hauled imported wares and food up to New Braunfels from the coast.

From the Southwestern Historical Quarterly, July 1955: The wagons had bodies shaped like sled runners drawn by four, five, or six oxen. “The Germans west of the Colorado had a better wagon and drove better mules. Like the desert caravans of old, they wound in long lines over the rolling plains.”

Poets like Fritz Goldbeck glamorized the Waggoner’s life. Mrs. Ernst Kapp in a letter written in 1850 and translated by Oscar Haas described the trip from Indianola to New Braunfels in glowing terms, like “green undulating prairies shimmering in the bright sun” and “from out of the distance slowly papering into view, long rows of heavy laden prairie schooners come rolling on”.

She describes wonderful food, and the men smoking short pipes engaged in conversation around the campfires. “Someone strikes up a song”. Then finally there is the sound of the whippoorwill.

Mrs. Kapp’s description sounds a lot more appealing than the other stories that I have read relating to the trek inland just five years earlier.

The first Waggoner of note in New Braunfels was George Ullrich who accompanied the first group of emigrants to New Braunfels and was named wagonmaster by Prince Carl. The Ullrich family was one of the few families that was already in Texas by the time the emigrants arrived.

Ullrich was born in Lindenau Meiningen in 1813. Family sources say he and Margaretha nee Decker were married in 1839 in New York City. Their first child was born in Frelsberg, Texas in 1842 and this is where they were living when Prince Carl was making arrangements to move the emigrants inland.

George Ullrich was consequently hired by the Adelsverein as the wagon master. He, along with his wife and 3-year-old child, guided the first group of emigrants from the coast to the interior. He subsequently guided the second group as well.

Oscar Haas has an interesting story in his History of New Braunfels and Comal County, Texas, 1844-1946. He states that “The story has it” that the first two women to cross the Guadalupe were Mrs. George Ullrich and Mrs. Frederick George Holekamp. Mrs. Ullrich crossed on the first wagon with her husband and Mrs. Holekamp crossed on horseback with Prince Carl.

The Ullrich family stayed in NB where he was elected a city alderman and sometime after 1850 was elected sheriff. Ullrich and his wife are both buried in the Adelsverein Cemetery.

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By Tara V. Kohlenberg —

This past weekend I attended a reunion of my husband’s family. I don’t know everyone and I don’t know the family history, so I found myself gravitating to “the old ones.” They are the ones who know the names of the faces in photos from long ago, as well as the history of the families, the land, and the town. I love hearing the stories and the connections. What happens when the families move away or there is no one left to tell the stories? Here at the Sophienburg, we sometimes find that the stories connect themselves through mystery and happenstance.

On March 20, 2018, I took a call from a man explaining that he had an “orphan” photo album that he was trying to connect to its descendants. The man gave his name as Vlad and that he was calling from Colorado. He asked if I knew the names Wiegreffe or Ervendberg. I told him that yes, we were very familiar with the Wiegreffe and Ervendberg names. He then sent me a series of emails with photographs of a photo album dating back to 1887. Vlad, an environmental engineer, described how he found the large velvet-covered photo album in a United Way thrift store where he volunteered. The fact that it was a beautiful history of someone’s family and yet “orphaned” in a thrift store was distressing to him. Based on the hand calligraphy inscription, “St. Louis, Missouri – July 5th, 1887, Presented to Ida Heine by Will. Leutkemeyer”, he set about to reconnect it to its family by first contacting the St. Louis Genealogical Society. Vlad and members of the St. Louis Genealogical Society forged a long distance partnership. They very painstakingly poured over the few names inscribed on the backs of the photos and were able to generate a family tree connecting most of the people in the album.

Vlad had very specific criteria for the descendants who would take possession of the album. He wanted the person to have ties to someone in the album, preferably to Wilhelmina Heine Luetkemeyer or Ida Heine Wiegreffe. He wanted the album and the story surrounding it to be preserved as a whole, with no selling or trading of photos. He felt the recipient should really want the album and want it to be passed along to their children in their will. Most importantly, if the album were to become orphaned again, it was to go to an organization that would find a new home for it, like a regional museum with German-American roots.

The Society published the information in their quarterly journal and worked to locate and contact descendants about the album. By the time Vlad and I spoke the first time, they thought they had possibly found a family member to take it. I wished him well, thinking that was the end of it. Then on June 20, I was notified by Comal County Historical Commission Chairman Karen Boyd that she would be bringing an Ervendberg descendant to the Sophienburg, Sybil Dodson and her two sons. The Dodson’s had come to give the large red velvet-covered family photo album of Ida Heine to the Sophienburg Museum and Archives. So, what is the connection with St. Louis and why did it come home to us?

Ida Heine Wiegreffe was a relative of Auguste Ervendberg Wiegreffe who was the daughter of L.C. Ervendberg. He had been hired by the Adelsverein as the first pastor to New Braunfels immigrants and was founder of the Waisenhaus (Orphanage). Ervendberg ran the orphanage with his wife, Louisa. They had three living daughters and two sons (beyond those children they lost as infants). Experiencing marital troubles, Louisa went north to Missouri with the three girls (Auguste, Bertha and Emma). Ervendberg was to follow with the two boys, but changed his mind and took the boys to Mexico along with an orphan girl, 17-year-old Franzeska.

Daughter Auguste returned to New Braunfels with her husband, Carl Wiegreffe, who became sheriff of Comal County from 1864 to 1866.

The Heine/Wiegreffe album was finally home. It had traveled through Texas, Missouri and Colorado before circling back. And, it had had the help of a complete stranger to recognize the album’s uniqueness and find its family.

As a side note, while visiting with Mrs. Dodson and her family, we learned that she had lived in San Angelo all her life. Conversation turned to vocation, and she talked about becoming a teacher after initially studying to become a nurse. I made the comment that my aunt from the Texas Panhandle had attended Shannon Nursing School in San Angelo. Mrs. Dodson asked her name. After I told her, she said, “She was my roommate”. My aunt had just recently passed.

Mystery and happenstance.

Don’t orphan those photo albums or odd pieces of memorabilia in antique stores. Bring those treasures to the Sophienburg Museum & Archives and let us reconnect them to their stories!

Sources:

• St. Louis Genealogical Society Quarterly
• Vlad Kantorovich
• Rootsweb

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