Emmie Seele Faust Memorial Library
New Braunfels, Comal County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Located on the corner of Coll Street and Magazine Avenue, the Emmie Seele Faust Memorial Library served as the New Braunfels Public Library from 1938 to 1969. The New Braunfels Library Association formed in 1928 to meet the need for better education in the growing community. For ten years, the association operated a public library at various locations around the downtown area. In 1937, Emmie Seele Faust (1867-1957), daughter of first New Braunfels teacher, Hermann Seele, spearheaded a combined effort between the city of New Braunfels, the Sophienburg Museum and the New Braunfels Library Association to give the Public Library a permanent home. The native rock building was designed by architect Jeremiah (Jimmie) Schmidt and opened in 1938 with 250 visitors. Built by Edwin Hanz, the rectangular, 65x30-foot building sits on a bell-shaped foundation made of rock and concrete. The front door and wrought-iron window grates are original. When the Dittlinger Memorial Library was built in 1967 on the back of the property, the Emmie Seele Faust Library building ceased to be the public library, taking on a new use as an archive and artifact collection storage space for the Sophienburg Museum and archives. The Dittlinger Memorial Library building became part of the Sophienburg in 1999. In 2010, the Emmie Seele Faust Library was restored and repurposed as a meeting hall and classroom, preserving the original intention of the library association and Emmie Seele Faust. RECORDED TEXAS HISTORIC LANDMARK – 2017
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
The New Braunfels Library Association formed in 1928 and ran a public library from shifting downtown quarters for a decade. In 1937 Emmie Seele Faust, daughter of the town's first teacher, led a joint effort by the city, the Sophienburg Museum, and the association to give the library a permanent home, and the native-rock building opened in 1938. It served as the public library until 1969, then became museum storage before being restored in 2010 as a meeting hall and classroom.
Why it matters
The library reflects the civic drive of small-town women who built lasting cultural institutions, and it honors a family line reaching back to the German community's very first teacher.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
By the early twentieth century, New Braunfels had grown well beyond its 1845 origins as a German immigrant settlement into an established Texas town with ambitions to match. Among those ambitions was a hunger for learning and self-improvement — a value the town's founders had carried with them, embodied from the very beginning in the figure of its first schoolteacher.
The 1920s and 1930s, when this library's story unfolds, were the great age of the American public library. Across the country, civic groups — very often women's clubs and library associations — were organizing to give their towns a permanent place to read, study, and gather. New Braunfels was part of that national current when its Library Association formed in 1928 to meet the needs of a growing community.
For a full decade the library had no true home, shifting from one downtown location to another. That it finally got a building of its own in 1938 — a native-rock structure raised in the depths of the Great Depression — speaks to how much the town wanted it, and how determined a handful of its citizens were to make it real.
People & events
At the heart of the story is Emmie Seele Faust, born in 1867 and, fittingly, the daughter of Hermann Seele — remembered as the first teacher of New Braunfels. To carry that name and then devote herself to the town's library was to close a circle that had opened with the community's very first lessons.
In 1937 she took the lead, bringing together the city of New Braunfels, the Sophienburg Museum, and the Library Association in a joint effort to give the public library a permanent home. The result opened the next year: a rectangular native-rock building, sixty-five by thirty feet, set on a bell-shaped foundation of rock and concrete, designed by architect Jeremiah 'Jimmie' Schmidt and built by Edwin Hanz. On opening day in 1938, 250 people came through the door — a striking turnout for a town of its size, and a measure of how badly the library had been wanted.
The building served as the public library until 1969. When the Dittlinger Memorial Library rose behind it in 1967, the older structure took on a second life as archive and storage space for the Sophienburg Museum. In 2010 it was restored and given a third purpose as a meeting hall and classroom — bringing it back, in spirit, to exactly what Emmie Seele Faust and the Library Association had built it for. Its original front door and wrought-iron window grates still stand, and in 2017 it was named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark.
Its place in the American story
The rise of the free public library is one of the quiet triumphs of American democracy — the idea that knowledge should be open to everyone, not just those who could afford books. This little rock building in New Braunfels is a local chapter of that national story, one repeated in thousands of towns during the same decades.
Just as important is who made it happen. Across the country, it was women — organized into clubs and associations, often without the vote for much of this era and rarely holding formal office — who founded and sustained a huge share of America's public libraries. Emmie Seele Faust and the New Braunfels Library Association belong squarely in that tradition of women building the cultural institutions their communities would lean on for generations.
There is also the lesson of reuse. Rather than let an outgrown building fall away, the community turned it into a museum archive and later a classroom, honoring its origins while keeping it useful. That instinct — to preserve rather than discard — is its own kind of civic maturity, and a model for how a town can keep faith with its past.
If you visit
Stand at the corner where the old library sits and let the building itself tell the story. The native rock, the sixty-five-foot length, the bell-shaped foundation — these are the marks of hands that raised something meant to last. Look closely at the front door and the wrought-iron window grates: they are original, the same ones visitors passed through when the doors first opened.
Knowing its three lives makes the place richer. Picture it first as the town's public library, then as the museum's quiet archive, and now as a room where people gather again to learn — the very purpose it was born for, restored nearly a century on. Few buildings get to fulfill their founders' intention twice.
It sits comfortably within a walk through historic New Braunfels, near the Sophienburg Museum that helped bring it into being and now safeguards the town's German-Texan memory. Pair a visit here with the museum and you'll leave with a clear sense of how one family, and one determined association of citizens, helped a frontier settlement grow into a town that cherished its books.
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
- · Emmie Seele Faust
- · Hermann Seele
Themes & tags
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