Durst House
Fredericksburg, Gillespie County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Carl Durst (1851-1923) moved to this community in 1873 and built a one-room cabin. After marrying Emma Ruegner about 1877, he made a small addition. The Dursts donated land for the nearby Cherry Mountain School, and teachers often lived in the 1896 stone addition to this house. From 1912 to 1926, Herman Durst, Carl's cousin, owned the property. The Durst house is an evolutionary structure reflecting the changing needs of its occupants. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1991
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Carl Durst arrived in the German settlement country of the Texas Hill Country in 1873 and started with a single-room cabin, adding on as his family and fortunes grew. The house expanded room by room over the decades—including an 1896 stone addition that sometimes housed teachers for the nearby Cherry Mountain School, on land the Dursts had donated. What survives is less a single building than a family's life told in wood and stone.
Why it matters
The Durst house embodies how immigrant homesteaders in the Hill Country literally built their lives in stages, and how ordinary families anchored the schools and institutions that turned settlements into communities.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Carl Durst
- · Emma Ruegner Durst
- · Herman Durst
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Market Square (Mark Platz)
Fredericksburg, TX
From Fredericksburg's founding in 1846, Market Square—Marktplatz to the German settlers—stood at the town's center, then still ringed by heavy forest. The octagonal Vereins Kirche rose the next year in the middle of Main Street, serving at once as church, school, meeting hall, and a refuge in case of raids, while a jail and public schoolhouse followed in the 1850s. Rebuilt in the 1930s as a pioneer memorial, the church became the county's first museum and library, and the square remains the community's gathering place.
Cherry Spring Schoolhouse
Fredericksburg, TX
The German families of the Cherry Spring community taught their children in private homes until 1885, when a sturdy limestone schoolhouse was finally completed on land donated by H. Bratherich — an occasion so joyful that on dedication day the students paraded together to their new building. The little stone school served the surrounding countryside for nearly eighty years, until it consolidated with Fredericksburg in 1962. It remains a landmark of early education in Gillespie County.
Liveoak Creek Log Cabin
Fredericksburg, TX
This dogtrot log cabin — two rooms joined by an open breezeway — likely predates 1852, when surveyor J. L. Ankrin sold the land to John Peter Keller, one of Gillespie County's first commissioners. It passed to Keller's son-in-law and then, in 1886, to Anton and Anna Loth, who built a two-story stone house nearby and demoted the cabin to a barn and corn crib. Restored in 1973, it survives as a relic of the county's earliest German-settled years.
Welgehausen Ranch
Fredericksburg, TX
German immigrants Friedrich and Juliane Welgehausen built a one-room log cabin on this Hill Country land in the 1850s. When their son Conrad and his wife Margaretha took over in 1873, they wrapped the original cabin inside a two-story limestone house, part of a cluster of early structures including a barn built as a rock-and-log house. The family held the ranch until 1975 and it was named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1983.