Captain Charles Welhausen

Welhausen's war was fought with cannon, not from the saddle shop he opened at High Hill in 1856. He volunteered in October 1861 as a second lieutenant in the Fifth Texas Field Artillery, a battery of Fayette County Germans commanded by his brother-in-law Edmund Creuzbauer. In May 1864 the battery helped take the Union gunboats Granite City and Wave at Calcasieu Pass. Creuzbauer resigned, Welhausen took command, and he kept it until the battery disbanded at Houston on May 22, 1865. His bank, opened in 1891, became the First National Bank of Shiner in 1900.

What the plaque says

Captain Charles Welhausen (September 2, 1835 - November 3, 1916) A native of Hanover, Germany, Charles Welhausen immigrated to Texas with his parents, arriving at the Port of Galveston in 1843. They settled first at Cat Spring in Austin County, and later moved to High Hill in Fayette county, where Charles became a saddle maker. Enlisting in the Confederate army at the outbreak of the Civil War, Charles Welhausen served at Fort Brown and Fort Manhassett in Texas before taking part in the Battle of Calcasieu Pass in Louisiana in 1864. Cited for gallantry in action, he was promoted to captain. Returning to Fayette County after the war, Welhausen married Eliza Amsler in 1867. He served as county commissioner and justice of the peace, and was elected to represent Fayette County in the twenty-first Texas Legislature in 1888. In 1890 the Welhausens and their children moved to Shiner, where they purchased a ranch from H. B. Shiner. Charles Welhausen opened a bank and became a respected business and civic leader; Eliza Welhausen was an active lay leader in the Methodist church. Charles Welhausen purchased this site in 1911 and donated it to the city for a park. (1992)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Spoetzl Brewery — 0.4 mi
  The brewery a Czech and German railroad town started in a tin shed in 1909, run through Prohibition by a Bavarian who had brewed in Cairo, and then by his daughter.
• Lavaca County Courthouse — 14 mi
  A limestone Romanesque courthouse of 1897-99 on the square of a town founded by a widow trader, in a county seat that once printed the Socialist Party's state paper.
• Gonzales Memorial Museum — 17 mi
  A 1937 Centennial museum for the Immortal Thirty-two who died at the Alamo, holding the small iron cannon Gonzales calls its Come and Take It gun and the Handbook calls a second one.
• St. Mary's Church of the Assumption (Praha) — 18 mi
  The mother parish of the Czech settlements around Flatonia, a stone-fronted church of 1895 whose ceiling Gottfried Flury turned into a turquoise garden, with an August 15 feast since 1855.

More markers nearby

• Shiner — steps away
• First National Bank of Shiner — steps away
• Kaspar Wire Works — 0.6 mi
• Saint Ludmila's Academy — 0.8 mi