German Pioneers in Texas

The lake that covers these farms is a federal flood-control project on the Guadalupe. The Army Corps of Engineers began the rolled-earth dam, 6,830 feet long, on June 27, 1958, and water began to rise on June 16, 1964; the Guadalupe-Blanco River Authority shared the cost in return for the conservation storage. The reservoir drowned farm and ranch land and the communities of Cranes Mill and Hancock. It also protected land downstream from floods and turned north central Comal County into a resort and residential center, with subdivisions selling lots even as the lake filled.

What the plaque says

German Pioneers in Texas In this area, now covered by Canyon Lake, German emigrants were the first settlers. A society of nobles (Mainzer Adelsverein) sponsored the emigration of 7,380 Germans to Texas from 1844 to 1847. They founded New Braunfels in 1845. Moving west, they established Fredericksburg in 1846. Their Comanche Indian treaty opened 3,800,000 acres between the Llano and Colorado rivers to peaceful settlement. Farmers and artisans, scholars and scientists, they triumphed over epidemic and privation to help build Texas and the West. (1968)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Gruene Historic District — 10 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.
• Sophienburg Museum and Archives — 12 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.
• 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

• Sattler — 1.7 mi
• Startzville Community — 4.7 mi
• Agricultural Society of Fischer — 9.1 mi
• Gruene — 10 mi