Site of Zanzenberg
Center Point, Kerr County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Home of Dr. Charles De Ganahl (1824-1883), a signer of the Texas Articles of Secession in 1861 and Army Surgeon for the Confederate States of America. The home was erected in 1856 and named after Dr. Ganahl's ancestral home in the Austrian Tyrol of Europe. Here the first post office in Kerr County was established in 1857 with his wife Virginia (1834-1895) as the first postmaster. (1968)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Dr. Charles De Ganahl built this home in 1856 and named it Zanzenberg after his family's ancestral seat in the Austrian Tyrol. A signer of the Texas Articles of Secession in 1861, he went on to serve as a surgeon for the Confederacy. The house also held Kerr County's first post office, established in 1857 with his wife Virginia serving as the county's first postmaster.
Why it matters
It links an immigrant's Old World roots to the founding of a Texas county and the coming of the Civil War, with a woman running its first post office—a small window onto how frontier communities took shape.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Dr. Charles De Ganahl
- · Virginia De Ganahl
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Cypress Creek Cemetery
Center Point, TX
Cypress Creek Cemetery holds the nineteenth-century heritage of a German settler community in the Texas Hill Country. Its oldest documented grave, from 1861, belongs to Laura Steves Boerner, whose husband Wilhelm was killed at the Battle of the Nueces in August 1862—a deadly clash in which Confederate forces attacked German Unionists fleeing Texas. Pioneers, children, a respected physician, and even two strangers who died of tuberculosis while passing through rest here.
Freidenker
Comfort, TX
Between 1845 and 1861, German 'Freidenker'—Freethinkers who prized reason, democracy, and secular learning—settled across the Texas Hill Country, many of them refugees from the failed 1848 revolution. They founded Comfort and neighboring 'Latin Colonies' where a knowledge of Latin marked the cultured farmer-intellectual. Committed to universal rights, they opposed slavery and secession, and their loyalty to the Union during the Civil War cost many of them their freedom and their lives.
"Treue Der Union"
Comfort, TX
Erected in 1866, this German-language monument—"Loyalty to the Union"—honors 68 mostly German settlers of the Hill Country who remained loyal to the United States during the Civil War. Fleeing toward Mexico, many were killed by Confederates at the Battle of the Nueces in 1862 and a later fight; their remains were gathered and buried here in 1865.
Meyer Hotel Complex
Comfort, TX
German immigrant Frederich Christian Meyer arrived in Comfort in 1862 and ran a stage stop and weigh station, gradually enlarging a log cabin and building a two-story stone home in 1869 for his wife Ernestine, a midwife who kept a separate building with maternity rooms for the women of the surrounding ranches. As rail lines reached the Hill Country in 1887, the Meyers added a hotel, and Ernestine and her children ran the business for decades after Frederich's death. A daughter, Julia Meyer Ellenberger, added a second guest house in 1920 and operated the complex until 1956.