Schlinke, Charles A.
Cuero, DeWitt County, Texas
Marker Inscription
CHARLES A. SCHLINKE (1863-1940) COMMUNITY LEADER AND BUSINESSMAN CHARLES A. SCHLINKE PLAYED A VITAL ROLE IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF DEWITT COUNTY. BORN IN POSEN, GERMANY, SCHLINKE IMMIGRATED TO THE UNITED STATES WITH FAMILY IN 1869, FOLLOWING HIS FATHER, WHO SETTLED IN WEESATCHE (GOLIAD CO.). IN 1885, CHARLES SCHLINKE PURCHASED PROPERTY FROM HIS FATHER AND MARRIED MARTHA KLEIMAN, WHO WAS ALSO BORN IN GERMANY BEFORE IMMIGRATING TO TEXAS. THE COUPLE HAD ELEVEN CHILDREN. SOON AFTER MARRYING, SCHLINKE PURCHASED 3,948 ACRES IN DEWITT COUNTY, AND IN 1893 HE BECAME A UNITED STATES CITIZEN. HE RAISED HORSES, MULES AND DONKEYS FOR SALE AS WORKING LIVESTOCK AND FOR RIDING. A BELIEVER IN THE VALUE OF EDUCATION, SCHLINKE DONATED TWO ACRES OF LAND TO COUNTY SCHOOL TRUSTEES FOR SCHOOL USE AFTER THE PREVIOUS BUILDING BURNED DOWN. RESIDENTS BUILT VALLEY VIEW SCHOOL ON THE DONATED PROPERTY. SCHLINKE WAS ALSO A FOUNDING MEMBER OF THE LINDENAU SCHEUTZEN VEREIN (LINDENAU SHOOTING CLUB), ESTABLISHED IN 1901. THE ORGANIZATION, WHICH STILL EXISTS, SPONSORED SHOOTING COMPETITIONS WITH OTHER NEARBY CLUBS AND PROVIDED FELLOWSHIP THROUGH FEASTS AND DANCES. SCHLINKE WAS OFTEN CALLED UPON AS AN ADVOCATE FOR HIS COMMUNITY. IN ONE INSTANCE, HE WAS THE SPOKESMAN FOR LANDOWNERS PROTESTING THE BUILDING OF A ROAD; TO RESOLVE THE ISSUE, SCHLINKE DONATED HIS OWN LAND FOR THE ROAD. HE ALSO DONATED PROPERTY FOR THIS PARK IN MEMORY OF HIS WIFE, WHO PASSED AWAY IN 1931. IN 1940, CHARLES A. SCHLINKE DIED FROM ILLNESS AND TODAY IS REMEMBERED AS A MAN WHO WAS DEVOTED TO HIS FAMILY, COMMUNITY, CHURCH AND BUSINESS. (2008)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Born in Posen, Germany, in 1863, Charles A. Schlinke immigrated to Texas as a boy and grew into one of DeWitt County's leading citizens. He built up thousands of acres, raised horses and mules for market, became a U.S. citizen in 1893, and repeatedly gave of his own land — for a schoolhouse, for a public road he had first protested, and for a park honoring his late wife. A founding member of the Lindenau shooting club, he was remembered at his death in 1940 as a man devoted to family, community, and church.
Why it matters
Schlinke's life traces the immigrant-to-community-pillar arc common to the German settlers of Central Texas, whose land gifts and civic leadership quietly built the institutions of a new country.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
Between the 1840s and 1870s, a great tide of German-speaking immigrants crossed the Atlantic and pushed into the interior of Texas, planting a belt of farming and ranching communities across the central and coastal plains. Many came from Prussian provinces like Posen, driven by land hunger, hard times, and the political turmoil of a Europe still reshaping itself. Texas — cheap in land and generous in opportunity — drew them by the thousands.
By the time young Charles Schlinke arrived in 1869, this German migration had already begun putting down roots in places like Goliad and DeWitt counties. The Civil War had ended only four years earlier, and the South was living through Reconstruction and, soon, the long boom-and-bust decades of the Gilded Age. For an immigrant family, the path forward ran through land, livestock, and the slow accumulation of standing among neighbors.
DeWitt County in these years was open ranching country, its economy built on cattle, horses, and the working animals that every farm and freight road depended on. It was a place where a hardworking newcomer could, over a lifetime, turn a father's foothold into thousands of acres — and a name people trusted.
People & events
Charles Schlinke was a small boy when his family left Posen in 1869 and followed his father to Weesatche, in neighboring Goliad County. He grew up inside that immigrant settlement, and in 1885 he bought property from his father and married Martha Kleiman, herself German-born before her family came to Texas. Together they would raise eleven children.
The young couple did not stay small. Schlinke assembled nearly four thousand acres in DeWitt County and built a livelihood raising horses, mules, and donkeys — the muscle of an agricultural economy that still moved on hooves. In 1893 he took the oath as a United States citizen, completing in law the belonging he had already earned in fact.
What the marker remembers most, though, is his open hand. When the local schoolhouse burned, he gave two acres so residents could build the Valley View School. He helped found the Lindenau Schuetzen Verein, a German shooting club, in 1901 — an organization that still exists, and that knit the community together with competitions, feasts, and dances. Once, chosen to speak for landowners who opposed a new road, he settled the dispute by donating his own land for it. And after Martha died in 1931, he gave property for a park in her memory. When he died in 1940, he was mourned as a man devoted to family, church, community, and business.
Its place in the American story
Schlinke's life traces an arc that played out tens of thousands of times across nineteenth-century America: the immigrant child who arrives with almost nothing and becomes a pillar of the place that took him in. It is the classic story of the German settlers of central Texas, whose thrift and civic seriousness built much of the region's early backbone.
His generosity points to something larger, too. In a young country still assembling its institutions, schools, roads, and public spaces often existed only because private citizens gave the land to make them possible. Naturalization, land ownership, and civic giving were the ways a newcomer converted labor into citizenship in its fullest sense.
The shooting club he helped found reflects how immigrants carried their culture with them rather than shedding it at the dock. The Schuetzenverein was a German institution transplanted to Texas soil, one of countless ways new Americans wove their inherited traditions into the national fabric.
If you visit
You are in the rolling ranch country of DeWitt County, where the land still runs to pasture and fence line much as it did when Schlinke worked it. The marker stands in the kind of quiet local setting that rewards travelers willing to slow down and read.
Take a moment with the idea that the very ground around you may be a gift: Schlinke gave land for a school, for a road, and for a park honoring his wife. Places like this are monuments not to a famous event but to a life of steady, generous citizenship.
If your route is carrying you through the German-settled parts of central and coastal Texas, let this be a first chapter. The shooting clubs, Lutheran churches, and family cemeteries scattered across these counties tell the same immigrant story from a dozen angles — and a marker like this one is the door into it.
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
- · Charles A. Schlinke
- · Martha Kleiman
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
English-German School
Cuero, TX
From 1877 to 1894 this stock-financed academy served as the first school in Cuero, a young town on the DeWitt County prairie. Reflecting the community's mixed Anglo and German heritage, it taught in both English and German. It stands as a marker of how immigrant settlers built bilingual learning into the earliest institutions of their new home.
Noll School and Cemetery
Mission Valley vicinity, TX
German immigrant Valentin Noll bought land in Victoria County before 1860, and in 1893 his son Joseph deeded two acres for a free community school, raised with the help of neighboring German settler families. One of the acres became a cemetery, opened with the 1894 burial of German settler Jacob Dentler, and it still holds seventeen graves of the Dentler, Noll, and Preiss families. The one-room schoolhouse was removed from the site in 1919.
Lindenau Community Cemetery
Cuero, TX
Lindenau took root in 1891 where Sandies Creek meets the Guadalupe, when German immigrant brothers Charles and Daniel Wild saw in the big oaks a reminder of the linden trees of home. The burial ground that grew here — begun as St. John Lutheran Cemetery in 1905 — reflects the tight-knit Texas German farming world, from headstones cut in German to a separate children's section and the graves of veterans, lodge members, and victims of an early-1900s flu epidemic. Deeded to a community association in the 1970s, it now holds hundreds of the settlers' descendants.
Lindenau
Lindenau, TX
German farmers put down roots on the DeWitt County prairie by 1891, and brothers Charles and Daniel Wild gave the place its homeland name, "Lindenau." A schoolhouse doubling as church and meeting hall anchored a full village—store, blacksmith, drugstore, post office, cotton gin, and a rifle club whose 1901 hall became the social heart of the community. When the railroad passed nearby in 1906, the whole town simply picked up and moved to meet it, a common fate before it faded after World War II.