Schmidtke-Callahan House
Bandera, Bandera County, Texas
Marker Inscription
This home was constructed in the 1870s by Georgia stonemason James Henry White for Charles F. Schmidtke (1839-1884). A native of Germany, Schmidtke was an early Bandera merchant, grist miller, and lumber mill operator. White's grandson J. Calvin Callahan (d. 1958), the owner of a feed store and poultry business, purchased the property in 1927. The limestone house, with influences of Greek Revival styling, remained in the Callahan family until the 1970s. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1981.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Built in the 1870s of local limestone by a Georgia stonemason, this Greek Revival–tinged house belonged to Charles F. Schmidtke, a German immigrant who helped power early Bandera as a merchant, grist miller, and lumberman. Decades later it passed to the Callahan family, whose feed and poultry business anchored the town, and it stayed in their hands into the 1970s.
Why it matters
It reflects how German immigrants and their skills built the commercial backbone of Texas Hill Country towns in the decades after the Civil War.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Charles F. Schmidtke
- · J. Calvin Callahan
- · James Henry White
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
The Mills of Bandera
Bandera, TX
In 1852, shingle-makers camped in a hairpin bend of the Medina River where cypress grew thick, and a Castroville mill owner soon moved his horse-powered sawmill to the spot. To supply the labor the company recruited sixteen immigrant families newly arrived from Upper Silesia, Poland, who helped build a dam and dig the millrace that powered the works. The Bandera mills produced shingles for much of the region—including several U.S. Army posts—until catastrophic floods in 1900 washed the industry away, leaving the town they had founded behind.
Mormon Settlers in Bandera County
Bandera, TX
In March 1854 a band of Latter-day Saints led by church elder Lyman Wight settled near the year-old town of Bandera on the Medina River. Wight had broken with Brigham Young and brought a colony of 250 to Texas in 1846, moving from Austin to Fredericksburg—where they ran grist and saw mills—before founding "Mormon Camp." Here they raised houses with gardens between them, milled grain, and crafted native-wood furniture to sell back East. When Wight died in 1858 the colony scattered, though a remnant stayed on in Bandera.
Mosty Brothers Nursery
Center Point, TX
The son of Belgian immigrants, Leander A. Mosty came to sparsely treed Kerr County in the 1890s and bet that Hill Country settlers would want fruit and pecan trees. From an 1898 orchard along the Guadalupe River his family built one of the Southwest's largest wholesale nurseries, breeding cling and freestone peaches and pecans that still bear the Mosty name. His sons helped organize the Texas nurserymen's association and supplied plants for the 1936 Texas Centennial grounds in Dallas.
Apelt Armadillo Farm
Center Point, TX
In the late 1890s German immigrant Charles Apelt turned a Texas oddity into an industry, founding the Armadillo Basket Factory on this site after discovering the decorative potential of the nine-banded armadillo's shell. His novelty baskets sold by the tens of thousands, reached the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, and employed dozens of local hunters at the operation's height. The farm supplied shells for lamps and desk sets and even live armadillos to zoos and medical research before it finally closed in 1971.