Ferdinand J. Lindheimer

Lindheimer came to botany as a political refugee. Educated at Bonn and Jena, he taught in Frankfurt until his part in the reform movement drove him to America in 1834, and he collected plants and insects for sixteen months at a German hacienda near Jalapa, Mexico. In 1843 he agreed to collect Texas specimens for George Engelmann of St. Louis and the Harvard botanist Asa Gray, the work that made him the father of Texas botany. Forty-eight species and subspecies bear his name, and his collections are held in at least twenty institutions, from St. Louis to St. Petersburg.

What the plaque says

Ferdinand J. Lindheimer Soldier in the Texas Army, 1836. A botanist of note. Born in Germany, May 2, 1801. Died December 2, 1879. His wife Eleonora Reinarz Lindheimer born August 3, 1818. Died May 16, 1895.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sophienburg Museum and Archives — 1.4 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 — 1.8 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.
• Natural Bridge Caverns — 14 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.
• Spring Lake and the Meadows Center — 16 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.

More markers nearby

• John F. Torrey, Site of Early Mill and Factory — 0.9 mi
• Home of Ferdinand Lindheimer — 1.0 mi
• Texas Germans in the Civil War — 1.0 mi
• New Braunfels — 1.1 mi