The Burrer Home
Fredericksburg, Gillespie County, Texas
Marker Inscription
German native Gottlieb Burrer (1830-1916) migrated to this area in 1854. Here he married Katharina (Zammert) (1843-1931), the daughter of a pioneer Fredericksburg family. They built this two-story stone residence in the 1860s. The interior originally included an undivided sleeping area on the second floor and was heated by woodburning stoves. One of the nine Burrer children, Otto, later lived here. Additions to the home were made during the 1950s. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1980
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Gottlieb Burrer was one of the German immigrants who poured into the Texas Hill Country in the 1850s, part of the wave that made Fredericksburg a distinctly German-Texan town. Arriving in 1854, he married into an established pioneer family and, in the 1860s, built this sturdy two-story stone house in the local vernacular—an open sleeping loft upstairs, wood stoves for heat. Generations of the Burrer family lived here, with mid-20th-century additions marking its long occupancy.
Why it matters
The house is a tangible record of the German immigration that shaped the culture, architecture, and craft of the Texas Hill Country.
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Related people
- · Gottlieb Burrer
- · Katharina Zammert Burrer
- · Otto Burrer
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Homestead of Karl Itz
Fredericksburg, TX
Karl Itz left Westerburg, Germany, as a boy and settled among the German immigrants of Gillespie County in 1852, marrying Henrietta Evers a few years later. When the Civil War came, Itz joined fellow German Unionists who refused to fight for the Confederacy and set out for Mexico, only to be overtaken by Confederate forces at the Battle of the Nueces in 1862. Many of his companions were killed, but Itz survived and lived in hiding until the war's end. He later moved his family here and built this stone home in 1875.
Ellebracht-Moritz Homestead
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Frederick Ellebracht brought his family from Germany to Texas in 1845, joining the wave of German immigrants settling the central Texas Hill Country, and in the early 1850s they built a home of one large log room with a loft. The house stayed in the family until 1891, when stonemason Joseph Moritz bought it and added two rough limestone rooms before 1907, layering German building traditions onto the original cabin.
Cross Mountain
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Long an Indian signal point rising 1,915 feet, this limestone hill was recorded in 1847 by German geologist Ferdinand Roemer, who arrived as German colonists settled the Fredericksburg area. Settler John Christian Durst, finding an old timber cross on its summit, named it Kreuzberg, or Cross Mountain. Its Easter fires recall both a German folk tradition and the 1847 Meusebach treaty that made peace with the Comanche nation.
Jacob Neffendorf
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