Schiege Cigar Factory Manager's House

Duane's take

Here's my telling of what the official marker has to say about the Schiege Cigar Factory Manager's House in Fayette County. Now, Charles Schiege ran a cigar factory, and he had a system worked out. The men he employed, mostly single fellows, they bunked right up in the attic of the factory building itself.

Practical enough. But Schiege was a man who thought ahead, and he knew his factory manager was likely to be a different sort altogether, a family man with mouths to feed and a wife who probably had opinions about sleeping in an attic. So around the time the factory opened in 1882, Schiege built a cottage right here at this site.

German vernacular design, the kind of sturdy, sensible craftsmanship you'd expect from someone building something meant to last. And last it did. One of the early men to hold the manager's post was Paul Herman Helmecke, born in 1864.

He and his wife Martha Mary Neuthard set up their household in that cottage, and they were not alone. Five children. The 1880s and 1890s, this little house was full.

Martha Mary was no stranger to Fayette County, either. She was the daughter of Pastor Adam Neuthard, a man the marker calls a prominent local figure. So picture it: a cigar factory humming along out front, single workers tucked away upstairs, and right here, the manager's cottage, full of children and anchored to the community by family and faith.

Paul Herman Helmecke passed in 1894. The cottage outlasted him. That's the thing about a well-built house.

It keeps the story long after the people are gone.

What the marker says

Charles Schiege employed mainly single men to manufacture cigars in his factory. The workers were provided with sleeping quarters in the attic area of the factory building. The factory manager, however, was often a family man, and to house these employees Schiege built a cottage of German vernacular design at this site about the time the factory was opened in 1882. Early cigar factory manager Paul Herman Helmecke (1864-1894) and his wife Martha Mary Neuthard, daughter of prominent local Pastor Adam Neuthard, lived here with their five children in the 1880s and 1890s. Sesquicentennial of Texas Statehood 1845-1995