Beseler Family

The community on the Beseler grant went by Bon Ton or Boyton before its post office opened in 1880 as Welfare, a name possibly taken from the German Wohlfahrt, a pleasant trip. In 1887 the San Antonio and Aransas Pass Railway finished its track between San Antonio and Kerrville, and Welfare had 275 people by 1892. Drought, a fire and the boll weevil hit hard, and by the mid-1920s only twenty-five people remained. The highway bypassed Welfare in 1930, the railroad was abandoned in 1970, the school closed into Comfort's district in 1952 and the post office in 1976.

What the plaque says

Beseler Family Carl Joseph and Augusta Beseler and their two sons immigrated from Germany to Texas in 1848. They settled in Kendall County on a land grant in the 1850s. The community of Welfare was established on the Beseler land grant. The Beselers' son Ernst died in the Battle of Nueces. His brother Carl Philipp was instrumental in building Welfare into a railroad shipping point in the 1880s. Carl Philipp served as justice of the peace, postmaster, county commissioner, and tax assessor. The general store is among the few physical remnants of the community of Welfare. (1996)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Treue der Union Monument — 8.7 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.
• Old Tunnel State Park — 13 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.
• Luckenbach — 19 mi
  A store, saloon and dance hall on Grape Creek that a humorist bought in 1971, declared a free state of mind, and turned into a pilgrimage for Texas music.
• 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.

More markers nearby

• Nicolaus Zink — 1.3 mi
• Ottmar von Behr — 5.1 mi
• Pinta Trail Crossing of the Guadalupe River — 5.6 mi
• Sisterdale — 6.1 mi