Old Lex Homestead

Spring Branch, TX

German Catholic families settled the Honey Creek area beginning in 1845, worshiping first in a home and a log chapel. In 1878 Johann Adam Kneupper and his wife Margarethe gave the land and helped neighbors raise this one-room chapel from locally quarried stone, where services were held until 1892.

Spring Branch, TX

Anhalt began in the 1850s as a small German farming and ranching settlement whose name means 'stopping place.' In 1875 residents organized the Germania Farmer Verein to combat cattle rustling with a shared brand and to support members' families, and in 1879 they built Anhalt Halle as a meeting and social hall. One of the oldest and largest dance halls in Texas, it still hosts Maifest, Oktoberfest, and performances that carry on the community's German traditions.

Spring Branch, TX

German native Adam Becker came to Texas in 1845 to join Prince Carl of Solms-Braunfels and the Adelsverein colonization effort, helping build Fredericksburg before establishing his own homestead here by 1852. He raised cattle and built a house of locally quarried stone and hand-hewn cypress cut from the nearby Guadalupe River. Becker became a U.S. citizen in 1860 and, at his death in 1901, was buried in the cemetery on his own land.

Boerne, TX

A veteran of the Prussian Army from a prominent German family, physician Ferdinand Ludwig Von Herff first reached Texas in 1847 amid the wave of German immigration to the Hill Country. By the 1860s he was a leading San Antonio doctor and civic figure, known across the Southwest for his medical innovations. He and his wife Mathilde owned a ranch here and helped nurture the growth of Boerne, where residents later raised a monument in their honor on a hilltop they loved.