Last week one of my occasional employers and I were talking about my current writing project, “Barsetshire with Cypress Trees – and a Lot of Sidearms”. This employer knows the Hill Country and Fredericksburg quite well, and he remarked at once upon how clannish many of the old German families are, and how difficult it was for him, as an outsider selling farm supplies, to do much business with them. They were, he said, very loyal to each other and to those few outsiders who had established relationships with them. I didn’t find this hard to believe at all, since the part of the chronicle I am writing now covers the bitter days of the Civil War in Gillespie County.

There is actually not much available in print or on line about that specific period; just barely enough to give tantalizing hints at what happened during those years. It’s a skeleton upon which to drape a story of split loyalties, of bewildering events and sudden hatreds, seemingly sprung fully-armored out of the ground, like dragons-teeth, much to the astonishment of recently arrived but cultured and hard-working German settlers. In the space of a decade and a half, they had turned Gillespie County from an all-but empty wilderness into their new homes. They established singing-societies, and newspapers, celebrated the Forth of July with parades and festivals, and participated in the great American experiment of democracy with passionate enthusiasm. The finest doctor practicing in San Antonio was a recent émigré from Germany. The German settlers also built stone houses and planted orchards, established mills, hotels and workshops. Their communities, even on the edge of the frontier, were prosperous and several degrees more attractive than similarly-situated Anglo-American settlements, and connected by regular stage lines and the US mail to the larger communities of Austin, San Antonio, Indianola and Galveston. But something happened, something that put a roadblock in the blending that usually happened with even the largest immigrant communities.

Those Hill Country towns are still very distinct, even a hundred and fifty years later. The same family names crop up over and over; Herff, Arleheger, Ransleben, Marschall, Keidel, among others. Other 19th century immigrant-founded towns diluted over the decades following their establishment but the Hill Country Germans did not. Up until WWI, German was the predominant language, almost exclusively, and I had read an account of a traveler passing through Fredericksburg in the 1880s, who insisted that he had only found one person in the place who spoke English, and that was the sheriff and he spoke it very badly at that. At first, I wrote this tendency off to the sheer numbers of German immigrants who poured in to Gillespie County, and the homogeneity of the communities they formed. They came all at once, relatively speaking, first through the auspices of the Mainzer Adelsverein in the mid 1840s, and then a second wave following upon the failure of the 1848 Revolution.

And then I read a little more, finding an interesting tid-bit in a translation/replica of a book put together for a celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Fredericksburg, which covered practically aspect of the founding of the town, in great detail, and with detailed first-hand reminiscences by many early settlers; how they forded the Pedernales River, and passed by an encampment of Delaware Indians, and one of the Verein troopers escorting them killed a bear at the river ford. They held a great celebratory feast that evening, in a grove of post-oak trees near where the Verein had begun building a blockhouse and a fenced compound, around which the town of Fredericksburg had been surveyed and marked out. (The blockhouse was about where the Subway sandwich shop on Main Street is now, catty-cornered from the Nimitz hotel.) Such accounts were so thorough I hardly needed anything else for a good few chapters… but contrasted oddly with comparatively terse accounts of what had happened among Fredericksburg’s citizens during the Civil War. Essentially, the person who wrote that particular segment in the mid 1880s admitted that feelings were still so raw about the Civil War, that it was best to just not go any farther with such details.

Interesting, but not entirely unexpected, that tempers would still be pretty hot, and wartime grudges would still be held. But still, I wondered about that. Texas had been a pretty far-distant corner of the Confederacy. And someone who had fought as a soldier in that war would be middle-aged when that book was written. A veteran or survivor would have spent twenty years building a post-war life, repairing a farm or business that would have been interrupted by the storm of war, or the Reconstruction that followed upon it. Texas had not been fought over, marched over, occupied and reoccupied to the same degree that some of the eastern states had been. The economy had been wrecked… but that was more due to the Union blockade, and the diversion of able-bodied men into military service. Emancipating the slaves caused barely a hiccup; there weren’t that many in Texas, comparatively speaking… and the German immigrants were famously opposed to chattel slavery anyway.

And that turned out to be exactly why feelings had run so hot and so hard, you see. (To be continued)