Bohls House
Pflugerville, Travis County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Gottlieb William Bohls (1878-1961), the oldest of Heinrich and Julie Schroder Bohls' ten children, was born on his family's farm near this site. In 1906, G.W. married Bertha Timmerman (1883-1967), and five years later they purchased a 95-acre farm on the Austin-Hutto Road, formerly the site of the Carrington Ranch School. They lived in a small home until this two-story, eight-room house could be completed in 1913. After twelve years, G.W. sold the property to his younger brother, Otto Walter Bohls (1898-1973), and his wife, Laura Emma Anna (Fuchs) (1898-1992). Otto promoted soil conservation practices on the farm and in the area, serving as chair of the Travis County Agricultural Adjustment Administration for 13 years. Contour farming, planting cover crops, building stock tanks, rotating crops and planting new seed varieties reduced wind and water erosion and kept the soil intact during periods of drought. The Bohls family deeded the property to the City of Pflugerville in 1993 to promote and interpret the city's heritage and culture. The Queen Anne Free Classic style house features a hipped cross-gabled roof with dormer windows and fishscale shingles. Prominent elements include a wraparound porch, main door sidelights, a longleaf pine interior, and cutaway bays with wooden brackets on the front-facing parlor and side-facing dining room. Original outbuildings included a barn, two homes for farm hands, a smokehouse, an outhouse and a carriage garage. The original rain harvesting system, including a 4,000-gallon brick and concrete underground cistern and a 2,000-gallon galvanized tin cistern above ground, was the home's only source of drinking water until 1975. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 2005
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Gottlieb William Bohls, eldest of ten children born on a nearby farm, raised this handsome two-story Queen Anne Free Classic house in 1913 on land once home to a country school. His brother Otto later took over and became a champion of soil conservation, using contour farming, cover crops, and stock tanks to hold the ground together through Texas droughts. With no plumbing until 1975, the household drew its drinking water from brick and tin cisterns fed by a rooftop rain-harvesting system.
Why it matters
The farm captures how German-descended Texas families put down deep agricultural roots and, in the New Deal era, pioneered conservation practices that reshaped how the land was worked.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
The land around Pflugerville was settled in large part by German immigrant families who arrived in Central Texas in the nineteenth century, drawn by farmland and the promise of building something lasting. They brought with them habits of thrift, craftsmanship, and deep attachment to family land — and they put down roots that lasted for generations. The Bohls family was one of these, farming near this site well before this house ever rose.
By the early 1900s, when this story really begins, Texas farm families were prosperous enough to build substantial homes but still lived close to the elements. There was no municipal water reaching out into the countryside, no easy utilities; a farmstead had to be, in large part, self-sufficient. A big farmhouse of this era was both a symbol of success and a working machine for survival, designed to collect its own water and shelter a large household.
This was also the Progressive and early modern era, a time when American agriculture was beginning to think scientifically about the land itself. The generation that built this house would live to see farming transformed by new ideas about conserving soil — ideas that arrived, urgently, with the droughts and dust of the decades to come.
People & events
Gottlieb William Bohls was born in 1878 on his family's farm near this spot, the oldest of ten children of Heinrich and Julie Bohls. In 1906 he married Bertha Timmerman, and five years later the couple bought a 95-acre farm on the Austin–Hutto Road — land that had once been the site of the Carrington Ranch School. They lived in a small house at first, then completed this ample two-story, eight-room home in 1913, a clear mark of a family that had arrived and meant to stay.
After a dozen years, G.W. sold the property to his younger brother, Otto Walter Bohls, and Otto's wife, Laura. It's Otto who gives the farm its larger meaning. He became a committed champion of soil conservation, serving thirteen years as chair of the Travis County Agricultural Adjustment Administration and promoting practices that were, in his day, genuinely forward-looking: contour farming, cover crops, stock tanks, crop rotation, and improved seed. The goal was to fight the wind and water erosion that could ruin farmland, and to hold the soil together through the droughts that periodically punished Texas.
The house itself tells its own tale of self-reliance. Until 1975, the family's only drinking water came from a rain-harvesting system feeding a 4,000-gallon underground brick-and-concrete cistern and a 2,000-gallon tank above ground. In 1993 the Bohls family deeded the property to the City of Pflugerville, so that the home and its history could be preserved and interpreted for the community.
Its place in the American story
The Bohls farm is a window onto two big American themes at once. The first is immigration and rootedness: families of German descent, like so many immigrant communities, put down agricultural roots so deep that they shaped the character of whole regions. The continuity here — one family on this land across generations, brother handing the farm to brother — is the quiet, unspectacular story of how much of rural America was actually built.
The second theme is conservation, and it's a big one. Otto Bohls's work with contour plowing, cover crops, and erosion control connects this single Central Texas farm to one of the defining struggles of the twentieth-century American countryside. In the era of the Dust Bowl, the nation learned — at terrible cost — that soil could be lost, and a movement arose to save it. Local leaders like Otto, working through county-level programs, were the hands that actually carried those ideas onto the land.
Even the cisterns matter to the national picture. They're a tangible reminder of how recently rural Americans lived without the utilities city dwellers took for granted, and how ingenuity and self-sufficiency filled the gap. A house that gathered its own rain until 1975 measures just how gradually modern convenience reached the countryside.
If you visit
This is a preserved historic home, given to the city expressly so its heritage could be shared, so it's a place made for looking closely. Start with the architecture: it's described as Queen Anne Free Classic, and the details are worth hunting for — the hipped, cross-gabled roof with dormer windows, the decorative fishscale shingles, the inviting wraparound porch, and the cutaway bays with wooden brackets on the parlor and dining room. Sidelights frame the main door, and the interior is finished in longleaf pine.
Then look for the practical marvels. If you can see the rain-harvesting system, picture a household that drew every drop of its drinking water from the sky until the 1970s — the underground brick cistern and the above-ground tank are the real story of daily life here. The farm once had a whole working world of outbuildings too: a barn, homes for farmhands, a smokehouse, and a carriage garage.
Standing on the grounds, remember what Otto Bohls did with this soil. The land around a Texas farmhouse can look like just a field, but here it's the site of real conservation work meant to outlast droughts. As a stop on a trip through the Austin area's fast-growing suburbs, the Bohls House offers something increasingly rare — a chance to stand still in a spot where one family's farming life is preserved whole.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Gottlieb William Bohls
- · Otto Walter Bohls
Themes & tags
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