Site of Zanzenberg

Duane's take

The way the marker tells it, here's the story of what once stood on this very ground in Kerr County. They called this place Zanzenberg. And before you wonder where a name like that came from in the middle of the Texas Hill Country, the marker has an answer: Dr.

Charles De Ganahl named it after his ancestral home in the Austrian Tyrol of Europe. There it is. A little piece of the Alps, planted right here in Kerr County.

Dr. De Ganahl, born in 1824 and gone by 1883, was no ordinary frontier settler. He was a signer of the Texas Articles of Secession in 1861, and he served as an Army Surgeon for the Confederate States of America.

The man carried some weight in the world he lived in. He raised the home itself in 1856, and whatever it looked like standing against these hills, it carried that European name from the day the timbers went up. Now here is the part that tends to stop people.

Just one year after the house was built, in 1857, Zanzenberg became home to the first post office in all of Kerr County. And the first postmaster of that office was not Dr. De Ganahl himself.

It was his wife, Virginia, born in 1834 and living until 1895. She held that post, quite literally. The doctor signed documents that shaped history, and Virginia ran the mail.

A partnership worth noting. Today the home is gone, and the site is what remains. But Zanzenberg still has a name, and now you know whose name it carries.

What the marker says

Home of Dr. Charles De Ganahl (1824-1883), a signer of the Texas Articles of Secession in 1861 and Army Surgeon for the Confederate States of America. The home was erected in 1856 and named after Dr. Ganahl's ancestral home in the Austrian Tyrol of Europe. Here the first post office in Kerr County was established in 1857 with his wife Virginia (1834-1895) as the first postmaster. (1968)