Schmidt-Gold House

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'm passing it straight along to you. There's a stone house sitting in Gillespie County that has a story built right into its walls, layer by layer, and I mean that almost literally. The Schmidt-Gold House goes back to the 1860s, when a German stonemason by the name of Lorenz Schmidt raised it up from the ground.

Now Schmidt wasn't just any settler. He was a pioneer in the Adelsverein colony, and if you know anything about the Hill Country, you know that colony left its mark on this land in a deep and lasting way. Schmidt was a builder, a serious one.

Among the structures he put his hands to was the Vereins Kirche, which tells you something about the kind of work this man did and the kind of community he was helping to shape. The house he built for himself started out as a story-and-a-half. Solid, practical, German to the bone in its materials and its design.

It stood that way for decades, carrying those early settler influences in every cut stone and squared corner. Then came 1902, and a man named Jacob Gold, Sr. came into the picture. Gold was a local business leader, and he was the founder of the Rheingold community out in eastern Gillespie County.

He took that story-and-a-half that Schmidt had built and enlarged it up to two full floors. Two different men, two different eras, one house. The Schmidt-Gold House stands today as a kind of layered record, the stonemason's foundation holding up the business leader's expansion, and the whole thing still whispering in the accent of those early German settlers.

What the marker says

This home was built in the 1860s by german stonemason Lorenz Schmidt, a pioneer settler in the Adelsverein colony and builder of many early structures, including the Vereins Kirche. Originally a story-and-a-half, the house was enlarged to two floors in 1902 by Jacob Gold, Sr., a local business leader and founder of Rheingold community in eastern Gillespie County. The home's materials and design reflect influences of the early German settlers. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1981