Smithson Valley Cemetery
New Braunfels, Comal County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Located off state highway 46 on Farm to Market Road 311 in the Texas Hill Country, the Smithson Valley Cemetery is the final resting place for German immigrants who settled the Smithson Valley community area. At one time, the community had a store, post office, blacksmith shop, one-room schoolhouse, dancehall, bowling alley and saloon. Many descendants of Johann Startz, one of the first 240 founders of New Braunfels and citizen of the Republic of Texas, are buried here. In 1876 the cemetery began as a family ranch cemetery for the burial of baby Karl Ohlrich, Jr., the young son of Heinrich Pantermuehl’s sister, Louise Pantermuehl Ohlrich. Heinrich Pantermuehl (1842-1921), husband to Johann Startz’s granddaughter, Pauline (1856-1933), formally deeded this land for a cemetery in 1898. The landscape of the Smithson Valley Cemetery is representative of other German family cemeteries found throughout central Texas. Graves face east to west arranged in uniform rows with curbing, perpetuating a custom widely used in Germany. Granite, marble and limestone gravestones are present, along with several unmarked graves thought to belong to children. Many inscriptions are in German. The grave of a young soldier, Herbert Startz (1893-1918), is decorated with a blanket of shells believed to be the signature of German cement finisher Henry Theodore Mordhorst. The Smithson Valley Cemetery Association, organized in 1970, maintains this historic cemetery, a reminder of german immigration and settlement in the hill country.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In the Texas Hill Country, this cemetery is the resting place of the German immigrants who settled the Smithson Valley community, once home to a store, post office, schoolhouse, dancehall, and saloon. It began in 1876 as a family burial ground and was formally deeded for a cemetery in 1898 by Heinrich Pantermuehl. Its east-facing rows, curbed plots, and German-language gravestones carry on customs brought from Germany.
Why it matters
The cemetery preserves the material culture and burial traditions of German immigration that shaped rural central Texas.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
The Smithson Valley Cemetery sits in the Texas Hill Country, a region whose rolling limestone hills and spring-fed creeks drew waves of German immigrants beginning in the 1840s. New Braunfels, founded in 1845, became the gateway for thousands of these settlers, and communities like Smithson Valley grew up in its orbit as families spread out to farm and ranch the surrounding land.
The cemetery's own timeline — a first burial in 1876, a formal deed in 1898 — places its founding in the decades after the Civil War, the Reconstruction and Gilded Age years when these rural German communities were putting down permanent roots. What began as scattered homesteads was maturing into a settled place with its own store, post office, school, and social life.
That social life was surprisingly rich. The marker recalls a community that once had a blacksmith shop, a one-room schoolhouse, a dancehall, a bowling alley, and a saloon — the full apparatus of a self-contained rural world, built by immigrants determined to reconstruct a way of life in a new land.
People & events
The names here reach back to the very founding of German Texas. Johann Startz was one of the first 240 founders of New Braunfels and a citizen of the Republic of Texas, and many of his descendants rest in this ground. To be buried among them is to be woven into one of the oldest immigrant lineages in the Hill Country.
The cemetery itself began with a heartbreak. In 1876 it was consecrated by the burial of baby Karl Ohlrich, Jr., the infant son of Louise Pantermuehl Ohlrich. What started as a family ranch cemetery for that one small grave grew into a community burial ground. In 1898 Heinrich Pantermuehl — the baby's uncle, and husband to Johann Startz's granddaughter Pauline — formally deeded the land so the cemetery could serve the whole valley.
Among the graves is that of Herbert Startz, a young soldier who died in 1918. His resting place is adorned with a distinctive blanket of shells, believed to be the signature work of a German cement finisher named Henry Theodore Mordhorst — a small artistic flourish that turns a headstone into a personal tribute.
Its place in the American story
German immigration was one of the largest streams of newcomers in nineteenth-century America, and nowhere is its imprint clearer than the Texas Hill Country. This cemetery is a physical record of that migration: the people who cleared the fields, built the schools, and raised the families that gave central Texas its distinctive character.
The cemetery's very layout carries the old country with it. The graves face east to west in uniform, curbed rows — a custom widely practiced in Germany and carried intact across the Atlantic. Many of the inscriptions are in German, so the stones themselves quietly document how long a mother tongue can endure among immigrants far from home.
In this way a modest rural cemetery becomes a lesson in how America was actually built — not by abstractions, but by specific families keeping specific traditions, generation after generation, until those traditions became part of the American landscape itself.
If you visit
Walk the rows slowly and read them as a kind of open-air archive. Notice how the graves are aligned east to west and edged with stone curbing — that uniform arrangement is a tradition brought directly from Germany, and once you see the pattern you'll see it everywhere.
Look closely at the stones themselves. You'll find granite, marble, and limestone, many carved with German inscriptions, and several unmarked graves thought to belong to children. Seek out the young soldier's grave from 1918 with its remarkable blanket of shells, a handmade signature of craftsmanship you won't find on an ordinary headstone.
The cemetery lies in the heart of the Hill Country off State Highway 46, and it pairs naturally with a broader drive through the German-settled towns of the region. As you stand here, picture the vanished village that once surrounded it — the store, the dancehall, the schoolhouse — and let the quiet remind you how completely a whole community can fold itself into memory, preserved now mainly by the people who tend these graves.
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
- · Johann Startz
- · Heinrich Pantermuehl
Themes & tags
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