"Treue Der Union"
Comfort, Kendall County, Texas
Marker Inscription
("Loyalty to the Union") This German language monument, erected 1866, honors the memory of 68 men (mostly Germans) from this region who were loyal to the Union during the Civil War. Trying desperately to reach U.S. Federal troops by way of Mexico, about 40 of the men were killed by vengeful Confederates bent on annihilating them, in the Battle of the Nueces (on Aug. 10, 1862) and a later fight (Oct. 18). The bodies of the slain and those who drowned swimming the Rio Grande were left unburied. A group of Germans gathered the bones of their friends and buried them at this site in 1865. (1968)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
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.
Why it matters
It stands as a rare monument to Unionist dissent in the Confederacy, testifying that the South was never wholly of one mind about secession.
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Related events
- · Battle of the Nueces
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
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.
Cypress Creek Cemetery
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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.
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Beseler Family
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Carl Joseph and Augusta Beseler brought their family from Germany to Texas in 1848 and settled on a Kendall County land grant, where the community of Welfare took root. The family's story tracks Texas's divided loyalties: their son Ernst died at the Battle of the Nueces, where Confederate forces killed German Unionists, while his brother Carl Philipp went on to build Welfare into a railroad shipping point and hold a string of county offices in the 1880s. The old general store is among the few remnants of the community they founded.