Gillespie County
Fredericksburg, Gillespie County, Texas
Marker Inscription
The trails of roving Indians crossed these hills settled by German pioneers in 1846. A group of Mormons settled at Zodiac in 1847. Created February 23, 1848. Organized June 5, 1848. Named for Richard Addison Gillespie, a Texan from 1837, a defender of the Texas frontier, and captain in the Mexican War who fell at Monterrey, September 22, 1846. Fredericksburg, the county seat.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Once crossed by the trails of roving Indian peoples, these Hill Country lands were settled by German immigrant pioneers in 1846, with a group of Mormons founding Zodiac the next year. The county was created and organized in 1848 and named for Richard Addison Gillespie, a Texas frontier defender and Mexican War captain who was killed at the Battle of Monterrey in 1846. Fredericksburg became its seat.
Why it matters
Gillespie County is a showcase of Texas's distinctive German immigrant settlement, layered onto Native trails and named for a fallen Mexican War soldier.
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Related people
- · Richard Addison Gillespie
Related events
- · Battle of Monterrey (1846)
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.
The Patton Home
Fredericksburg, TX
Business leader Albert Lee Patton and his wife Emma built the first four rooms of this limestone home in the mid-1870s, soon after buying the property in the German-settled town of Fredericksburg. Later additions, including a three-window front bay, expanded the house as the family and the town prospered. It remained in Patton hands for more than a century, passing to a daughter before leaving the family in 1978.
Pape Log Cabin
Fredericksburg, TX
Friedrich Pape, his wife Katherine, and a surviving daughter reached Galveston from Germany in late 1845, having lost three children on the voyage, and were among the first forty families to settle Fredericksburg. Soon after arriving in May 1846, neighbors joined in communal labor to raise this post-oak log cabin to shelter the ailing Mrs. Pape. Its hand-cut logs and once-thatched roof make it one of the oldest structures in town.
Ressmann-Boos House
Fredericksburg, TX
This Fredericksburg home is a small chronicle of frontier building written in its own walls. The oldest section, from about 1845, is fachwerk — the timber-and-infill method German immigrants carried to the Texas Hill Country — while later additions in log and clapboard frame show how families adapted with what they had. The Ressmanns bought it in 1866 and the Boos family held it into the 1970s, more than a century in the hands of two settler households.