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Austin, TX

Edward E. Zimmerman left Germany for Texas in 1844 and settled with his wife Regina near Austin a decade later, part of the German immigration that reshaped the Hill Country. In 1861 he built this sturdy farmhouse of local cream-colored stone and Bull Creek lumber, along the Shawnee Trail that carried traders, immigrants, and great cattle drives of the 1850s and 60s. Family lore even recalls Regina shooting a bear at the back door.

Round Rock, TX

Settlement gathered here in the late 1830s, and by mid-century former Austin mayor Jacob Harrell was selling lots near the Stagecoach Road crossing at Brushy Creek. A post office opened in 1851, and the community soon renamed itself Round Rock for a distinctive limestone ford; immigration from several states and Sweden doubled its population in the 1850s. When the railroad built a new townsite to the east in 1876, "New Town" quickly eclipsed the old settlement, and Round Rock briefly rivaled Austin as a commercial hub before growing, a century later, into one of the nation's fastest-expanding cities.

Manor, TX

Swedish immigrants founded Manda in the 1880s, naming it for Amanda Bengtson Gustafson, sister of the town's postmaster. Within a decade it was a working farm community with a cotton gin, general store, and blacksmith shop, its social life anchored by a Swedish Methodist congregation organized in 1892 and a Lutheran chapel built in 1896. As rural schools consolidated and congregations dispersed, Manda faded, leaving its cemetery and repurposed schoolhouse as reminders.

Austin, TX

Johann Jacob Groos left Germany for Texas in 1845, part of the great wave of German immigration that reshaped the Hill Country, and put his surveyor's training to work opening the New Braunfels area to settlement. He held Comal County office for over a decade, served in the Confederate militia during the Civil War, and in 1874 was elected Commissioner of the General Land Office — the state agency at the very center of Texas's land-grant story.