Clear Spring Hall and Store

The community around the store went by two names. Germans reached the area in 1845, drawn by Prince Carl of Solms-Braunfels's colony at New Braunfels, and Clear Springs and Schumannsville became the county's chiefly German settlements. A post office called Bernhardsville opened in 1874 and took the name Clear Springs the next year. In the 1890s the community had a general store, a cotton gin and 100 residents. The post office closed in 1906, the school was consolidated with the New Braunfels district by the 1950s, and in 2000 the population was reported as 200.

What the plaque says

Clear Spring Hall and Store This area was settled by German immigrants in the 1840s and 1850s. Named for a water source later inundated by Lake Dunlap, the Clear Spring Community never evolved into a town, but remained a rural settlement. A store built at this site in the 1870s by Johann Andreas Breustedt became the commercial and social center for the surrounding area. A saloon and community hall were added to the building in later years, and the Clear Spring Gin Company located behind the store was important to the local cotton industry. 1989

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sophienburg Museum and Archives — 4.1 mi
  The hilltop where Prince Carl of Solms-Braunfels raised the Adelsverein's headquarters in 1845, now the museum and archive of the German colony that became New Braunfels.
• Gruene Historic District — 5.0 mi
  A cotton town on the Guadalupe that the boll weevil emptied, rescued in the 1970s by a kayaking architecture student, with a dance hall that says it has never closed.
• Spring Lake and the Meadows Center — 17 mi
  The headsprings of the San Marcos River, among the longest-inhabited places in North America, once an amusement park with a swimming pig and now seen from glass-bottom boats.
• Natural Bridge Caverns — 17 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

• Site of Dietz Community — 1.8 mi
• Comal County — 2.8 mi
• New Braunfels — 2.8 mi
• Near River Crossing Used by New Braunfels' First Settlers — 3.1 mi