11/01/2026
We love learning a little history....
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Most Texans are taught that German Texas means the Hill Country. Fredericksburg, New Braunfels, the Adelsverein, the 1840s. That is the second wave. The first one landed fifteen years earlier and two counties over, and it is the reason the second one came at all.
In 1831 a man calling himself Friedrich Ernst took title to a league of land on Mill Creek in what became Austin County. He had been a quartermaster sergeant and then a post office clerk in Oldenburg, his real name was Christian Friedrich Dirks, and he had left Germany in 1829 under a charge of embezzling from the post office. The man who started German Texas was traveling under an assumed name.
He surveyed his league with a Westphalian named Charles Fordtran, who took a quarter of the land as payment for the work. Then, in February 1832, Ernst wrote a letter home describing Texas in terms that sound like a sales pitch and were taken as gospel: a winterless climate, abundant game, land for the asking. That letter was reprinted in a German newspaper and carried into an emigrant guidebook published at Oldenburg in 1834 by a man who had come out to Texas to see for himself and stayed at Ernst's place on Mill Creek.
It worked. Families sold up and came. Ernst laid out a townsite in 1838 and called it Industry, the first German town in Texas, and between 1838 and 1842 alone several hundred Germans moved in around it. His house served as the hotel, and he picked up the name father of the immigrants.
One family came because of that letter specifically. When the von Roeder fortune faded in Westphalia the family read Ernst and decided on Texas, and an advance party of four reached Cat Spring in July 1834, two of whom, Joachim and Valeska, were dead of yellow fever within weeks. Rosalie von Roeder had met Robert Kleberg through her brother at Gottingen and agreed to marry him only if he would move to Texas with the family. They married that September and sailed at the end of the month.
By the 1850 census there were 8,266 German born people in Texas. In Austin County alone there were 750, and by 1860 German born farmers there outnumbered the American born ones.
