Adolph (Ad) Toepperwein

Ad's partner was Elizabeth Servaty, born in New Haven in 1882 to German immigrants and working at the Winchester factory when they met. They married in 1903, and soon she was shooting chalk from between his fingers. She earned the nickname Plinky when a tin can she hit went plink. She was the first woman in the United States to qualify as a national marksman with the military rifle and the first to break 100 straight targets at trapshooting, which she did more than 200 times. Annie Oakley called her the greatest shot she had ever seen.

What the plaque says

Adolph (Ad) Toepperwein Adolph Toepperwein in the 1880s, elements of the old west were fading and became romanticized through wild west shows. These promotions created opportunities for those with skills, including sharp-shooters. Adolph (ad) Toepperwein was born in Boerne on October 16, 1869 to Johanna (Bergmann) and Emil Albrecht Ferdinand Toepperwein, who immigrated to Texas from Prussia in 1850. Ad's father was a gunsmith who built and designed guns and, because of this, ad became proficient with firearms at a young age. By the age of ten, he could outshoot many veteran marksmen. After his father's death, ad moved to San Antonio to perfect his shooting skills. In 1889, he quit his cartoonist job at the San Antonio express and went to New York seeking a vaudeville job. For two years, he shared the stage with many vaudeville acts. He then joined the Orin Brothers circus, with which he toured for eight years. In 1901, the Winchester Repeating Firearms Company signed him to a long-term contract as an exhibition shooter. On a visit to the Winchester Plant in Connecticut in 1902, Ad met a cartridge assembler named Elizabeth Servaty. After a short courtship, they were married. Ad taught her how to shoot and they began touring as a husband and wife shooting team known as the wonderful Toepperweins. They traveled for over forty years until Elizabeth died in 1945. Ad retired in 1951 and died on March 4, 1962. Ad was a long-time member of the Boerne Schuetzen Verein, was inducted into the Texas Sports Hall of Fame in 1966, made Ripley's Believe It or Not and the Guinness Book of World Records. One of Boerne's most famous sons is remembered and respected for his many shooting records over the years. (2013)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Treue der Union Monument — 17 mi
  An 1866 German-language monument in Comfort over the graves of Hill Country Unionists killed at the Nueces in 1862, its flag of thirty-six stars kept at half-staff.
• Frontier Times Museum — 21 mi
  A museum built of fossils, petrified wood and cave formations in Bandera, holding a printer-historian's collection of frontier relics and oddities.
• Old Tunnel State Park — 22 mi
  A railroad tunnel abandoned in 1942 that now shelters up to three million Mexican free-tailed bats, who fly out each evening from May through October.
• Natural Bridge Caverns — 24 mi
  The largest known cavern in Texas, found in 1960 by four college cavers under a ranch family's land, entered beneath a 60-foot limestone bridge and still growing.

More markers nearby

• Staffel Family and the Staffel Store — 0.3 mi
• Homesite of Albert Paul Kutzer — 0.3 mi
• Camino Real de San Saba (Camino Viejo) in Kendall County — 0.5 mi
• Kendall County — 0.5 mi