Mosel-Jordan-Duecker Haus

Duane's take

Here's my telling of what the official marker says about the Mosel-Jordan-Duecker Haus in Gillespie County. Pull up a chair, because this old limestone house has had more lives than most folks dare dream of. It starts, as so many Hill Country stories do, with a German immigrant and a fresh start on Texas soil.

Johann Nicholas Mosel, born in 1839, was granted a lot by the German Emigration Company back in 1847. Not a sprawling ranch, mind you. A hundred feet by two hundred feet.

Enough ground to plant your boots and call something yours. And on that modest rectangle, Mosel put up a rough limestone structure. The kind of building that doesn't ask permission from the weather.

Just hunkers down and outlasts it. Now here's where the story gets interesting. That northeast corner of the house, the part Mosel built with his own hands, it may have later done a second kind of duty entirely.

See, Mosel eventually moved out to a farm about four miles west of town, and that original structure might have served as what the Germans called a Sunday house. A place to stay when you came into Fredericksburg for church and provisions, then locked up and left again come Monday morning. A house that lived on borrowed weekends.

Mosel himself lived until 1904. The house, of course, kept going. In 1860, a German immigrant named August William Jordan bought the property.

Jordan died in 1898, and after that, his sons carried the deed. And then those sons sold it, passing the old limestone walls along to a man named Henry Duecker. Duecker, who would live until 1950, took the place on as a Sunday house of his own.

And in 1924, he added frame additions to the old limestone bones Mosel had laid down generations before. So what you've got here, standing on that original hundred-by-two-hundred lot, is a house that sheltered three family names across the better part of a century, each one leaving their mark, each one passing it forward. The limestone Mosel cut is still there in the northeast rooms, patient as the Hill Country itself, just waiting for somebody to stop and notice.

What the marker says

Johann Nicholas Mosel (1839-1904) was granted a 100' x 200' lot in Fredericksburg by the German Emigration Company in 1847. Here he built a rough limestone structure (now the northeast rooms), which might have served later as a Sunday house when he moved to an outlying farm (4 mi. W). German immigrant August William Jordan (d. 1898) bought the house in 1860. His sons sold it as a Sunday house to Henry Duecker (d. 1950), who added the frame additions in 1924. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1986