Gold-Grobe House
Fredericksburg, Gillespie County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Built in 1902 by Peter Gold, Sr., this house was originally a one-story center passage plan structure constructed of native limestone. Friedrich William Grobe bought the house in 1914. In 1916 he added a second floor and rear wing using concrete blocks manufactured by the local Basse Brothers Cement Yard. A descendant of Fredericksburg pioneers, Grobe was a blacksmith, surveyor, and farmer, and served as postmaster of the nearby town of Rheingold. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1989
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Built in 1902 as a modest one-story limestone house, this Fredericksburg home was doubled in size by Friedrich William Grobe, who added a second floor in 1916 using concrete blocks from the local Basse Brothers Cement Yard. Grobe embodied the many-handed self-reliance of the Hill Country's German settlers—blacksmith, surveyor, farmer, and postmaster of nearby Rheingold. The mix of hand-cut stone and machine-made block captures a community moving into the industrial century.
Why it matters
Descendants of Fredericksburg's German pioneers built and rebuilt homes like this one, showing how immigrant families put down lasting roots and adapted new materials to old-world craft.
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Related people
- · Peter Gold, Sr.
- · Friedrich William Grobe
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
The Carl Henke Home
Fredericksburg, TX
Carl Henke was said to be the first boy born among the German immigrants who founded Fredericksburg, and he grew up to become a skilled stonemason. In 1874 he built the original two-room limestone portion of this house—with a loft reached by an outside stair—for John Schmitt, then bought it for himself in the 1880s. His family kept the home for nearly a century, a quiet record of the settlement's first native-born generation.
Pioneer Schandua House
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Built before 1880 and bought by merchant John Schandua soon after his 1883 marriage to Bertha Klein, this house kept a distinctly German-Texan plan: a front "stube" that served as both bedroom and living room, with the children's room behind. Gingerbread trim dressed up the porch posts, and for a time the residence even hosted Sunday School for Bethany Lutheran Church. It captures the blended domestic and community life of a Hill Country merchant family.
The August Hennersdorf House
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August and Johanne Hennersdorf left Prussia for Fredericksburg in 1855 and, in the early 1900s, built this frame-and-limestone home for their family. Local tradition holds that the floor joists beneath the frame section are the octagonal wooden columns salvaged from the town's original Vereins Kirche, dismantled in 1896. If so, the house quietly carries a piece of the community's founding meeting-house within its bones.
Kiehne-Hermann Home
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German-born blacksmith Frederick Kiehne built this house in 1850, and it stood out immediately: the first two-story home in Fredericksburg, where even prosperous neighbors made do with sleeping lofts. He raised it from hand-cut limestone, adobe brick, and native timber—the improvised toolkit of frontier builders. A county commissioner as well as a smith, Kiehne left a home enlarged by later owners and restored in the 1970s.