Site of Geier and Schmid Farm

🏛️The era

In the 1840s and 1850s, German-speaking immigrants poured into Texas. Many came through the port of Galveston and then moved inland toward the Hill Country and the lands between San Antonio and Austin. New Braunfels, founded in 1845 with backing from an organized society of German nobles that promoted emigration, quickly became a hub for these newcomers.

The immigrants came from many German states, each with its own dialect and traditions, because Germany was not yet a single nation. They brought farming skills, craft trades, and a strong sense of community, and they built towns, churches, and farms across south-central Texas.

By the mid-1850s, families were moving out from the early German towns to claim new farmland nearby. Small communities sprang up along the creeks and roads northeast of San Antonio, including the one then called Cibolo, later known as Selma. Rural life there revolved around family farms, neighbors, and small family burial grounds.

👥People & events

Wilhelm Geier, his wife Theodora, and their daughter Johanna came from Wolfenbuettel and landed at Galveston in 1849. Like many Germans, they headed inland to New Braunfels. There, in 1854, Johanna married Martin Schmid, an immigrant from Wuerttemberg, a different German state. In Texas, newcomers from different regions of the old country often found each other and built new families together.

In 1855 the Schmids and Johanna's parents moved to the young community then called Cibolo. Together they bought 127 acres and set up a farm for each household. In 1869 Geier and Schmid formally divided the land, each taking a share. Martin and Johanna raised four children here: William, Sam, Sedonia, and Mary Elizabeth.

Martin served in the Civil War with the 32nd Regiment of Texas Cavalry, in the company of Capt. Theodore Podewils. When he died in 1880, he was buried nearby, beginning the Schmid family cemetery. Johanna stayed on the farm until 1894, then sold it and moved to San Antonio. In time she was buried in the family cemetery with her parents, two infant children, and her children William and Sedonia.

About 100 yards away lies another family plot. David Kincaid, a native of Kentucky, brought his family here and worked as the town blacksmith. His wife Talitha, their daughters Esther and Josephine, and Talitha's father, John Davis, rest in the Kincaid cemetery. Fencing and tombstones have vanished from both burial grounds, leaving the marker to keep their memory.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

The Geier and Schmid story is one small thread in a very large pattern. German immigration reshaped much of Texas in the 19th century, and towns, farms, churches, and even food traditions across the state still reflect it. This marker shows that migration not as a statistic but as a family: parents and a daughter crossing an ocean, settling, marrying, farming, and building lives.

The nearby Kincaid family adds another side of the story. American-born settlers like a Kentucky blacksmith were moving into Texas at the same time, and in places like this the two streams of settlers lived side by side as neighbors. Rural Texas was built by both.

The vanished headstones also carry a lesson. Countless small family cemeteries across America have lost their markers to time, weather, and development. Historical markers like this one help preserve the memory of ordinary people whose lives made up the real fabric of frontier settlement.

🧭If you visit

Today this is part of the suburban San Antonio area, so it takes some imagination to picture the 127 acres of farmland the Geier and Schmid families worked. Try to see past the modern streets to a landscape of fields, fences, farmhouses, and a blacksmith's forge ringing nearby.

Keep in mind that this site is about graves as well as a farm. The original fencing and tombstones are gone from both the Schmid and Kincaid cemeteries, so treat the area with the respect you would give any burial ground.

This stop pairs naturally with a trip to New Braunfels, where the Geier family first settled and Johanna married Martin Schmid, and with the old German communities of the region. Following the trail from Galveston to New Braunfels to this spot traces the very route thousands of German immigrant families took into the heart of Texas.