Immigration

Kosse, TX

Limestone County's rich kaolin clay, found in the Wilcox formation, made it a center of 19th-century Texas pottery. Most kilns were of the "groundhog" type—a brick- or rock-lined underground passage drawing heat from a firebox to bake ware within. German immigrant Lee Kimik built one such kiln active in the 1870s and 1880s, notable for its deeper sidewalls and for the rare practice of marking his pottery, which he sold directly to nearby Headsville. Archeologists documented the site in 1984.

San Antonio, TX

The King William neighborhood grew on farmlands once tilled by Mission San Antonio de Valero — the Alamo — that were distributed to residents after the Spanish government secularized the mission in 1793. Subdivided in the mid-1800s, the area drew many German immigrants fleeing political and economic turmoil, and it took its name around 1866 when Ernst and Emma Altgelt honored Wilhelm I of Prussia. Later arrivals, including Mexican families displaced by the 1910 Revolution, added to a neighborhood now prized for the richest, most intact collection of historic architecture in San Antonio.

Austin, TX

In 1916 the heirs of Texas Governor Elisha Pease formed a company to subdivide his estate into what became Austin's Enfield neighborhood. In 1922 Belmont "Belle" Graham, a Pease cousin, and her husband Florian Bibb King built this house, which the Von Rosenberg family later owned from 1928 until 1988. Blending Prairie School and Renaissance Revival details — a porte cochere, composite columns, and a wide hipped roof — the home reflects the tastes of Austin's early-20th-century residential expansion.

Booker, TX

Kiowa Cemetery holds a community of German-Russians—descendants of Germans who had settled the Russian steppe under Catherine the Great in the mid-1700s. Around 1910 several of these families settled along Kiowa Creek south of Booker, where they soon built a Lutheran church, and the burial ground took its first grave, Abraham Littau, in 1912. In 1916 the Littau family deeded the land for a cemetery still tended by the descendants of those buried there.

Hutto, TX

German-born William Klattenhoff immigrated to Texas in 1872 at seventeen, and work on the International and Great Northern Railroad brought him to Hutto, where he bought land in 1876. After marrying Alvina Plattow he built a first home, then a grander second house in 1896 as his success as farmer, rancher, and businessman grew. The homestead stayed in the family into the 21st century, a marker of German settlement in the region.

Tomball, TX

Built in the 1890s by Edward Kleb, grandson of German immigrants who reached Texas in 1846, this hall-and-parlor farmhouse anchored a stretch of dispersed rural settlement in northwestern Harris County. His son Elmer "Lumpy" Kleb, born in the house, lived without utilities and devoted himself to the land, planting trees and nursing injured wildlife. When mounting tax debt threatened the property in the 1980s, a national outpouring helped Harris County buy it in 1991 and create the Kleb Woods Nature Preserve.

Kingsville, TX

Kleberg County was carved from Nueces County in early 1913 and organized that June, with Kingsville named as its seat. It honors Robert Justus Kleberg, a pioneer German settler who fought at the Battle of San Jacinto in Texas's 1836 war for independence. The county lies at the heart of the vast South Texas ranching country made famous by the King Ranch.

Bastrop, TX

Built between 1887 and 1890 for Charles and Maria Kleinert, this house stands among a cluster of Bastrop homes raised by German immigrants in the nineteenth century. Fellow German immigrant and local innkeeper A. L. Hoppe bought it in 1890, and it remained in his family until 1961. With its pedimented architraves, jigsawn porch details, and distinctive octagonal bay, it is a fine example of eclectic Victorian-era design.

Bastrop, TX

Prussian immigrant Carl Kleinert and his wife Marie settled in Bastrop in the early 1860s, joining a sizable community of German merchants. In 1868 he built this grocery and mercantile, which after an 1890s fire gained the pressed-metal cornices, cast-iron columns, and wood storefront it still wears. The building stayed in the Kleinert family until 1931 and has since housed a succession of businesses.

Fredericksburg, TX

Johann Jost Klingelhoeffer left Europe in 1846 seeking freedom and opportunity, sailing to the port of Indianola and making his way through New Braunfels to Fredericksburg. Around 1854 he built his home in the German Fachwerk, or half-timbered, style—oak timbers filled with handmade brick and two ground-floor rooms divided by a dogtrot breezeway. Additions after the Civil War and again in 1955 reshaped the house, but it endures as an example of the distinctive Texas-German building tradition unique to the Hill Country.

Fredericksburg, TX

This limestone building went up around 1870 in Fredericksburg, the storied German settlement of the Texas Hill Country, combining a storefront in front with a two-story home behind. Christian Kloth bought it in 1878, and after his death it passed to his daughters and stayed in the Ludwig family until 1966, hosting a succession of shops along the way. Its dual purpose reflects the practical, work-and-live rhythm of a nineteenth-century immigrant town.

Spring Branch, TX

German Catholic families settled the Honey Creek area beginning in 1845, worshiping first in a home and a log chapel. In 1878 Johann Adam Kneupper and his wife Margarethe gave the land and helped neighbors raise this one-room chapel from locally quarried stone, where services were held until 1892.

Silsbee, TX

August Knupple, a Prussian immigrant who came to Texas in 1846 to farm, established this cemetery on his land around 1870, though the earliest marked grave dates to 1871. Its stones — including Woodmen of the World markers and the graves of Civil War veterans — record at least sixteen nineteenth-century burials. Since the 1930s, family, volunteers, and a cemetery association have kept watch over the resting place of the pioneering Knupple family and their neighbors.

Jefferson Precinct, NE

Albert Kobs left Germany in 1867 and his future wife Henrietta followed from the same homeland in 1870; the couple married and bought a Nebraska farm in 1874, raising most of their children on that prairie land. The small pioneer cemetery that bears their name preserves the memory of an immigrant family that helped settle Douglas County. Their short lifespans—both died young—speak to the hardships of frontier homesteading.

Tomball, TX

In the 1860s this corner of Harris County was a scatter of sawmills and farms known as Pillotville, until German immigrant Paul Kohrmann arrived from Baden around 1870 and gave the settlement its lasting name. His general store and the Kohrville post office, run after his death by his wife Agnes, became the social heart of a widely dispersed community. Settlers came from Prussia, Denmark, Ireland, England, and the American South, and African American families relocated here as well, building schools, churches, and a cotton gin.

Palestine, TX

Soren Kolstad, a skilled clockmaker born in Norway in 1823, emigrated to Texas in 1852 and opened a jewelry store in Palestine the following year. Passed down through five generations of his family, the shop is believed to be the oldest retail business in Texas still run by its founding family. Its mahogany display cases, installed in 1916, moved with the store to its present home in 1933.

Round Top, TX

German immigrants Konrad and Elisa Joh made their home in this hand-hewn live-oak cabin, chinked with mud, straw, and sand and built around 1848 near the old Galveston-to-Bastrop road. In 1875 the couple used oxen to haul the entire structure some 300 feet uphill, and later the Paetzold family lived within its walls. It stands today as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark.

Mason vicinity, TX

Settlers began arriving in this Mason County locality in the 1850s, but the community took its name from William Koock, a German immigrant who built a one-room log store here in 1867. Koock's enterprise grew into a two-story rock building that served as the headquarters for area cattle and sheep ranchers, who bought supplies, took credit, and even deposited their gold for safekeeping there, while dances filled its second floor. Koocksville had one of the county's earliest schools and a grist mill and cotton gin, but after Koock died in a riding accident in 1890 the store closed and the town declined into a scattering of stone ruins.

Carrollton, TX

A handful of Korean immigrants reached Texas by the 1920s, but larger numbers came after the Korean War (1950–53), including women who married American servicemen stationed in Korea and orphans adopted by Texas families, especially around Dallas. After the 1965 abolition of national-origin quotas, Korean nurses, professionals and entrepreneurs settled in Dallas, Houston, Killeen and beyond, building communities often centered on churches.

Art, TX

Heinrich Conrad Kothmann and his wife Ilse sailed from Germany to the Texas coast in 1845, joining the wave of German immigrants who helped settle the Hill Country around Fredericksburg. Granted 640 acres in Mason County, the cabinetmaker-turned-rancher moved to the Art community in 1856 as one of its first families. All that remains of the original ranch is the small family cemetery, begun with Heinrich's burial in 1881 and still tended by his descendants.

Orchard, TX

When Francis Smith subdivided this land in 1891, he gave four acres the next year for a school and church for Czech settlers, who named their community Krasna—"beautiful" in Czech. Families built a school in 1892 that soon joined the local district, one that also included the Connersville School for African American children, and more schools followed. Repeated flooding and storms, along with the pull of the Catholic church at nearby Wallis, eventually drew the settlers away.

San Antonio, TX

Anton Krause and Johanna Roesler emigrated from Austria in 1854, walking much of the way from the Texas coast to San Antonio, where they married the following year. In 1875 they moved to rural southwestern Bexar County near Mann's Crossing, building a log cabin and stone kitchen with the help of neighbors. Anton served twice as postmaster—running the office from his home—and the family's law-enforcement ties meant Texas Rangers and federal agents sometimes held prisoners in the house.

La Grange, TX

German stonemason Heinrich Kreische bought nearly 175 acres above the Colorado River in 1849 and built his home, barn, and smokehouse on the high bluff. In the 1860s he turned brewer, crafting "Bluff Beer" in a spring-fed operation with an elaborate cooling tunnel system, and sold it across Central Texas until 1884 — two years after a work accident took his life. The stone complex he left behind remains a landmark of German craft and enterprise.

Fredericksburg, TX

Frederick Kuenemann and his family were part of the great wave of German emigration that founded Fredericksburg in the Texas Hill Country in the 1840s, arriving in 1846 after a hard overland journey that cost them a daughter's life. The heart of this house is a fachwerk, or half-timbered, dwelling built around 1847—heavy timbers braced diagonally and filled with fieldstone, a building method carried straight from medieval Europe. Over the following decades the family prospered, turning a settler's cottage into a Victorian home ringed by furniture shops, a lumberyard, and a hardware store. The house's transformation mirrors the immigrant family's own rise.

Boerne, TX

German immigrant William Kuhlmann, a successful Boerne pharmacist and landholder, built this house in the late 1880s. It passed to Selina Long King, whose sons ran the local King & King Lumber Co., and later served the school district and even housed Hill Country artist Harry Anthony DeYoung while he taught in San Antonio. The city of Boerne has owned it since 1951, and it was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1982.

Ferdinand, IN

In 1840 the Rev. Joseph Kundek, a Croatian-born Catholic missionary priest, laid out the town of Ferdinand in the forests of Dubois County to draw German Catholic settlers into southern Indiana. Tradition holds that he nailed a board reading "Ferdinand" to a tree at this very site to name the new settlement. Kundek was a tireless colonizer of the region, founding several German Catholic towns and helping bring the Benedictines who would establish nearby monasteries.

Uvalde, TX

Louis Schwartz, a native of Alsace-Lorraine, immigrated to the United States in 1866 and settled in Uvalde, at first peddling dry goods and medicines from a wagon across the surrounding country. In 1878 he opened a mercantile store near Main and Camp streets, moving it to a new building around 1900. After his death in 1924 his sons carried the business on until it finally closed in 1960 — more than eight decades as a fixture of Uvalde commerce.

Prince George's County, MD

This Latin inscription marks the spot in the Maryland countryside where Pierre (Peter) Charles L'Enfant lay for more than eighty years. A French-born military engineer who volunteered for the Continental Army during the Revolution, L'Enfant went on to draw the sweeping grand plan for the new federal capital on the Potomac — the radiating avenues and ceremonial vistas that still shape Washington, D.C. He died in obscurity and near-poverty in 1825 and was buried on a private estate here in Prince George's County. As the inscription records, in 1909 a grateful nation finally reinterred his remains with honor at Arlington National Cemetery, leaving this cenotaph to mark his first resting place.

Solvang, CA

This bilingual plaque records that the shrine, or grotto, was begun in 1970 and finished and dedicated in 1981 by the Club Guadalupano, with a fountain added later. It stands near Solvang's Old Mission Santa Inés, built by a Mexican-American Catholic devotional society. The grotto grew over a decade of volunteer labor from the parish community.

Mission, TX

In 1849 French priests of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate fanned out from Brownsville to minister across the lower Rio Grande Valley, and a Reynosa merchant named Rene Guyard gave them part of his Rancho La Lomita for a mission to serve his ranch hands. The first chapel rose here in 1865, and after Guyard's 1871 death the Oblates inherited the land, farming it to fund further missionary work. Though the farm proved a financial drain and most of it was sold in 1909, the little La Lomita Chapel gave its name to the nearby town of Mission.

Brownsville, TX

Adrian Ortiz left Spain as a teenager and settled in Brownsville before he turned eighteen, taken in by relatives who trained him in the merchant's trade. In 1892 he built this store to house La Madrilena — "native of Madrid" — a mercantile business that anchored the community for more than sixty years. Its vernacular brickwork, corbeling, parapets with pinnacles, and transomed doors still speak to the ambitions of a nineteenth-century immigrant merchant.

Benavides, TX

This cemetery began in 1894 on land that was once part of Rancho La Mota de Olmos—'the cluster of elms'—settled by Francisco Bazán Villarreal, a native of Nuevo León who received the surrounding land grant in the 1870s. Many of those buried here were born on the ranch itself, and the graves include Bazán and Don Pedro Bazán, a well-known curandero, or folk healer. Still active today, the roughly 250-foot-square ground holds more than a hundred graves.

McAllen, TX

Older than the city of McAllen that grew up around it, this burial ground likely began as a small ranch cemetery in the 1800s, with its earliest known interment — Gertrudis Cavazos — in 1895. Much of the land came from the Arnold family, with other parcels acquired from the city. Its graves hold veterans of conflicts reaching back to World War I, some who served in foreign armies, amid religious iconography, Masonic emblems and Woodmen of the World markers, tended since 1930 by a dedicated association.

Rockdale, TX

After coal was discovered near Rockdale and the railroad arrived, mining opened the district to labor by the 1890s, and many of the workers came north from Mexico during years of revolution. Settling on land north of the tracks, these families named their community La Recluta — "recruitment" — sharecropping to feed themselves while the men worked the mines, often paid in tokens good only at the company commissary. Their story holds both hardship, including a 1913 cave-in that trapped miners for six days, and hope, embodied in La Escuelita, the little schoolhouse where children of Spanish-speaking homes were taught in English.

Dallas, TX

On this ground in 1854, European idealists founded La Reunion, a colony inspired by utopian social theory that drew French, Belgian, and Swiss settlers to the Texas prairie near the young town of Dallas. Though the ambitious experiment in communal living soon faltered, many colonists stayed on, enriching the region with their skills and culture. The Daughters of the American Revolution placed this marker in 1924 to remember them.

Dallas, TX

In the late 1850s a company recruited French, Belgian, and Swiss colonists to found La Reunion, an experiment in European settlement on the Texas prairie near the young town of Dallas. The venture failed within a few years, but a number of families—Loupots, Remonds, Reverchons, Santerres, and others—chose to stay, becoming business, agricultural, and cultural leaders in the growing city. This cemetery, holding early colonists like an aged French grenadier and a colony director's young child, remained in family use into the 1930s.

San Marcos, TX

In the early 1900s San Marcos's Mexican American community organized to improve its working and living conditions, and in 1912 more than a thousand people rallied in nearby Uhland toward that end. From this ferment grew mutual aid societies, including La Sociedad Mutualista Cuauhtémoc, whose modern form took shape from 1918 and expanded in the 1940s to represent the community. Named for the last Aztec emperor, it bought land in 1944 that became El Parque Cuauhtémoc, a gathering place for dances, fiestas, weddings, and political meetings later enclosed as Cuauhtémoc Hall. Through scholarships, aid, and celebration, the society remains a unifying force in San Marcos.

Pharr, TX

Organized in 1913 after a group of Spanish-speaking residents sought their own place of worship, this was the first congregation to minister to Pharr's Spanish-speaking Protestants and the second-oldest church in the city. Its early names—"The Mexican Methodist Church" and later "North Pharr Latin American Methodist Church"—trace shifting language about the Mexican-American community it served before it became La Trinidad in 1970. New sanctuaries in 1959 and 1995 marked its steady growth.

New Orleans, LA · est. 1972

Lafayette Cemetery No. 1 was laid out in 1833 to serve the growing City of Lafayette, its raised stone tombs answering the low, wet ground of New Orleans where burial below the surface was impractical. Generations of the city's residents — immigrants and epidemic victims among them — were interred in its famous above-ground vaults. It was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1972.

Nordheim, TX

Born in Germany, H. W. Laging joined the great mid-century wave of German immigrants who settled the Texas Hill Country and coastal plains, arriving in 1860 and marrying a fellow German settler. He took up arms for the Confederacy in a Texas infantry unit, then returned to build a successful life as a farmer and businessman. Beloved as "Papa Laging," he lived on as the last surviving Confederate veteran of his community, a bridge between the German immigrant experience and the Civil War generation.

Mirando City, TX

Born near San Luis Potosí, Mexico, in 1910, Eduarda "Lala" Banda immigrated with her family and grew up in the oil boomtown of Mirando City. Widowed young with two children, she supported them by cooking for local families, mastering a wide range of dishes. On the last day of 1953 she opened Lala's Café in a small four-room house, and its handmade tortillas drew customers from miles around — including airmen from Laredo Air Force Base — earning notice in newspapers and Texas Monthly.

Fulton, TX

This burial ground served the pioneers of Lamar, the coastal town founded by Irish-born Texas Revolution veteran James W. Byrne, who named it for his friend Mirabeau B. Lamar, president of the Republic of Texas. Its earliest grave belongs to Patrick O'Connor, a bookkeeper who had worked for Byrne in New Orleans. After the town of Lamar vanished by 1915, the neglected cemetery was rescued and restored in the 1940s.

Lamesa, TX

As Dawson County's cotton economy outgrew its labor supply in the 1920s, the region came to depend on migrant workers from Mexico, and in 1942 the federal Farm Security Administration opened the Lamesa Farm Workers Community to house them. Unusually well appointed—with indoor plumbing, running water, a clinic, a nursery, and schools—the camp asked no rent, only upkeep and contributions to a welfare fund, while families harvested cotton and worked the gins and mills. Amid long workdays they kept their bicultural life alive with baseball, Conjunto music, and both Mexican and American holidays, until the Ybanez family bought the site in 1980 as low-income housing, today's Los Ybanez.

Lancaster, PA · est. 1982

One of Pennsylvania's oldest counties, Lancaster was formed in 1729 and named for Lancashire in England, reflecting the mix of British, German, and other settlers who made it home. The county seat grew into an important inland town and briefly served as the state capital from 1799 to 1812. Its deep, well-watered soils became some of the most productive farmland in America, worked by a patchwork of ethnic and religious communities including the Pennsylvania Germans.

Jarrell, TX

This Williamson County burial ground first served Corn Hill, a settlement named by county judge John E. King for the cornfields around his home, which by the 1880s boasted a post office, cotton gins, mills, and a newspaper. Settlers Nicholas and Elizabeth Ann Land began the cemetery in 1863 with the burial of their son and soon opened it to neighbors; a cemetery association bought the grounds in 1886. When the railroad bypassed Corn Hill in 1909, the new town of Jarrell rose along the tracks, and its residents adopted the same cemetery—later scarred by the deadly 1997 F5 tornado.

Castroville, TX

These weathered limestone buildings rose beside the Medina River ford on the old Eagle Pass–San Antonio road, where Alsatian colonist Michel Simon settled in 1844 as part of Henri Castro's immigrant colony. Later owners turned a home and store into a wash house, residence, and two-story hotel, while a riverside mill built in 1854 was modernized over the years and even generated hydroelectricity by the 1920s. Ruth Lawler kept up the old tradition of hospitality at her "Landmark Inn" before deeding it to the state in 1974.

San Benito, TX

This house stands on the Concepción de Carricitos grant, land deeded by the king of Spain in 1781 to Eugenio and Bartolomé Fernández — a reminder of the Spanish colonial roots of the lower Rio Grande valley. Brownsville attorney Col. Stephen Powers acquired part of the grant as a legal fee and gave the site to his daughter Frances and her husband James Lambert Landrum, who completed the home in 1902. Generations of the Landrum family lived here, tying a modern residence to a land title nearly two centuries old.

Fort Worth, TX

Italian immigrant John B. Laneri settled in Fort Worth in 1883 and rose to become a leading businessman and civic figure, founding the O.B. Macaroni Company and a private boys' school known as Laneri College. In 1904 he built this classically detailed brick home, with fine interior woodwork, in one of the city's most fashionable neighborhoods, living there until his death in 1935.

Mason, TX

Near the busy Fort Mason crossing of the Colorado River stands the home of Maurice Lappe, a Swiss immigrant who came to Texas in 1884. His house served as a seat of local court, and his property was among the first in Llano County to boast wire fencing and orchards.

Laredo, TX

By the 1880s Laredo had held annual municipal elections for well over a century, a civic tradition dating to its Spanish colonial founding. In 1886 that ritual erupted into violence as two rival political factions clashed — the Guaraches, named for the humble Mexican sandal and led by Darío González, and their opponents. The bloodshed reflected the intense, deeply personal nature of local politics in a close-knit border community where family, class, and party loyalties ran together.

Laredo, TX

In 1897 Laredo's lodge of the Improved Order of Red Men, a national fraternal society, resolved to celebrate George Washington's birthday, and in February 1898 they staged a two-day festival of parades and a mock battle. What began as a lodge event grew into one of the largest and longest-running Washington's Birthday celebrations in the country, a distinctly binational fixture of this border city. It endures as a signature Laredo tradition more than a century later.

Ben Bolt, TX

José María Valadez, born in Tamaulipas, Mexico, bought land in this part of South Texas in 1864 and, with his wife Josefa, built a ranching enterprise raising cattle and sheep and growing corn and cotton. He named the place La Laguna de las Calaveras—the lagoon of skulls—for skeletal remains found there, thought to belong to Indigenous people lost in a great flood. The cemetery, whose earliest marked grave dates to 1878, has served the Valadez family and the Ben Bolt community for generations.

Lamar County, MS

On July 8, 1889, on Richburg Hill in southern Mississippi, John L. Sullivan outlasted Jake Kilrain over an astonishing seventy-five rounds under the broiling sun to keep his heavyweight crown. It was the last major bare-knuckle heavyweight championship in America — after it, the padded gloves and rounds of the Marquess of Queensberry rules took over the sport. Fought quietly to dodge anti-prizefighting laws, the bout became instant legend.

Hazle Township, PA · est. 1972

On September 10, 1897, hundreds of unarmed immigrant coal miners marched near Hazleton to demand fairer wages and working conditions in the anthracite fields. Sheriff's deputies opened fire on the strikers, killing nineteen and wounding dozens more, most of them recent Eastern European immigrants. The bloodshed shocked the nation and became a rallying point for the growing labor movement and the United Mine Workers.

Hazle Township, PA · est. 1997

On September 10, 1897, a group of unarmed immigrant coal miners—Polish, Slovak, and Lithuanian—marched from Harwood toward Lattimer demanding higher pay and fair treatment. Sheriff's deputies opened fire on the peaceful column, killing nineteen and wounding many more. The dead were laid to rest in the ethnic parish cemeteries around Hazleton, and the massacre became a rallying cry for the growing labor movement in the anthracite fields.

Tinicum Township, PA · est. 2008

Established in 1799 after a devastating yellow fever epidemic, the Lazaretto stood as Philadelphia's line of defense against imported disease. For nearly a century, ships bound for the port stopped here first so that cargo could be inspected or fumigated and passengers examined; the sick were hospitalized and held until they recovered — or died. For countless arriving immigrants, this quarantine station was their very first taste of America.

Houston, TX

The League of United Latin American Citizens formed in Corpus Christi in 1929 to unite Texas Hispanics against discrimination while promoting education, patriotism, and equality. In 1934 more than twenty Houston men chartered Council 60 in Magnolia Park, going on to open jobs for Mexican Americans in wartime industry and the city's police and fire departments. The council backed landmark court fights—including Hernandez v. Texas before the U.S. Supreme Court—and launched the "Little School of the 400," a model for the national Head Start program.

Lebanon, PA · est. 1982

Lebanon County was organized in 1813 from parts of Dauphin and Lancaster counties, though the community here reached back much further — its township dated to 1729 and the town of Lebanon to around 1740. Settled largely by Pennsylvania Germans, the area grew into a landscape of prosperous farms and closely held religious traditions. That blend of rich agriculture and faith gave the county an enduring identity rooted in its early settlers' values.

Giddings, TX

Straddling the Old San Antonio Road on land first surveyed for Moses and Stephen F. Austin's colony, Lee County became in 1854 the heart of Wendish settlement in America, when Pastor Johann Kilian led his Sorbian-speaking congregation from Central Europe to a new home here. Their school was the only one in the United States to teach in Wendish, a Slavic language that survives in the modern world chiefly here and in Australia. The county was organized in 1874 and named for Confederate general Robert E. Lee, with Giddings as its seat.

Fredericksburg, TX

In 1882 German immigrant Henry Lehne raised this limestone house in the old-country farmhouse tradition brought to the Texas Hill Country by Fredericksburg's German settlers. He farmed and ranched, hauled goods to San Antonio as a teamster, and outlived two wives while raising nine children under its roof. A frame addition built by his daughter and son-in-law in 1933 extended a family occupancy that lasted 109 years.