Ellebracht-Moritz Homestead
Fredericksburg, Gillespie County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Frederick Ellebracht (1809-1882) and his family came to Texas from Germany in 1845. Joining other immigrants from their homeland in central Texas, they built this home in the early 1850s. The house consisted of one large log room with a loft. The home remained in the Ellebracht family until 1891 when it was purchased by Joseph Moritz (1860-1942), a stonemason who built two rough limestone additions onto the house before 1907. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1987
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Frederick Ellebracht brought his family from Germany to Texas in 1845, joining the wave of German immigrants settling the central Texas Hill Country, and in the early 1850s they built a home of one large log room with a loft. The house stayed in the family until 1891, when stonemason Joseph Moritz bought it and added two rough limestone rooms before 1907, layering German building traditions onto the original cabin.
Why it matters
The homestead reflects the German immigration that gave the Texas Hill Country around Fredericksburg its distinctive stone-and-timber architecture and enduring cultural character.
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Related people
- · Frederick Ellebracht
- · Joseph Moritz
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Homestead of Karl Itz
Fredericksburg, TX
Karl Itz left Westerburg, Germany, as a boy and settled among the German immigrants of Gillespie County in 1852, marrying Henrietta Evers a few years later. When the Civil War came, Itz joined fellow German Unionists who refused to fight for the Confederacy and set out for Mexico, only to be overtaken by Confederate forces at the Battle of the Nueces in 1862. Many of his companions were killed, but Itz survived and lived in hiding until the war's end. He later moved his family here and built this stone home in 1875.
Jacob Neffendorf
Fredericksburg, TX
Jacob Neffendorf sailed from Nassau in the German states aboard the barque Neptune in 1845, part of the wave of immigrants who settled the Texas Hill Country under the Adelsverein colonization scheme. He helped survey the Fredericksburg townsite and move families up from New Braunfels in 1846, receiving the standard town lot and ten-acre outlot and building a log cabin on Creek Street. Clearing land near Cross Mountain, he steadily assembled more than 200 acres, raised eight children with his wife Katherina, and served a term as Gillespie County treasurer.
Cross Mountain
Fredericksburg, TX
Long an Indian signal point rising 1,915 feet, this limestone hill was recorded in 1847 by German geologist Ferdinand Roemer, who arrived as German colonists settled the Fredericksburg area. Settler John Christian Durst, finding an old timber cross on its summit, named it Kreuzberg, or Cross Mountain. Its Easter fires recall both a German folk tradition and the 1847 Meusebach treaty that made peace with the Comanche nation.
The Burrer Home
Fredericksburg, TX
Gottlieb Burrer was one of the German immigrants who poured into the Texas Hill Country in the 1850s, part of the wave that made Fredericksburg a distinctly German-Texan town. Arriving in 1854, he married into an established pioneer family and, in the 1860s, built this sturdy two-story stone house in the local vernacular—an open sleeping loft upstairs, wood stoves for heat. Generations of the Burrer family lived here, with mid-20th-century additions marking its long occupancy.