DUANE
Duane's take
Here's my telling of what the official marker has to say about this stretch of the Guadalupe River — and friend, it's a story worth pulling over for. Now picture this crossing. The San Antonio-Nacogdoches Road meets the Guadalupe River right here, and this wasn't some forgotten backwater.
Some of Texas' most famous trail-blazers had already worn a path through this very spot before our story even begins. The road was old. The river didn't care.
But what was coming down that road in the spring of 1845 was something new. About two hundred German colonists. Two hundred souls who had started this journey not in Texas, not even on the same continent — but in Europe.
Six months they'd been traveling. Six months. You let that sit a moment.
Whatever hardships this part of Texas has ever asked of a traveler, multiply it by an ocean crossing and the better part of half a year, and you start to understand what these people had already been through before they ever saw the Guadalupe. And then, on Good Friday of 1845, they stopped right here. They didn't just camp.
They founded a town. They named it New Braunfels, after the estate of Prince Solms-Braunfels, who served as the commissioner-general of the German Emigration Society. A prince's estate, transplanted in name to the banks of a Texas river on the most somber Friday of the Christian calendar.
There's a certain weight to that timing that the people who chose this day surely felt. Now, these two hundred weren't alone in the larger sense. They were part of a wave — German colonists arriving between 1844 and 1847 — small groups, determined groups, groups that knew what they were building even when they weren't sure exactly where they'd build it.
And what they built, and what they brought, left a distinctive mark on the heritage and culture of Texas that you can still find woven into the fabric of this region today. Six months from Europe. A road used by trail-blazers.
A river crossing that had seen plenty. And on one Good Friday, a town. That's how a crossing becomes a founding.
What the marker says
At the crossing of the San Antonio-Nacogdoches Road on the Guadalupe River (used earlier by some of Texas' most famous trail-blazers) about 200 German colonists ended a journey that had begun six months before, in Europe. Here, on Good Friday,1845, they founded the town of New Braunfels, named for the estate of Prince Solms-Braunfels, the commissioner-general of the German Emigration Society. Part of a wave of German colonists,1844-1847, this small group and others like it have left a distinctive mark on the heritage and culture of Texas. (1969)