Gruene

Gruene's social life centered on Henry Gruene's dance hall. A sign over the bar promised the best liquor and beer at Heinrich's, and during Prohibition another read, Only Near Beer is Sold Here, Real Beer is Sold Near Here. The hall served polka bands and square dances, traveling salesmen's displays, saengerfests, graduations, elections and even dog and badger fights. Saturday dances broke at midnight for sandwiches and coffee and ran until 5 A.M. Oscar Haas remembered the long bar, the polkas, schottisches and waltzes, and children asleep in the side room.

What the plaque says

Gruene German immigrant farmers were the first settlers of this area, which was orignally called Goodwin. Henry D. Gruene established a large cotton farming operation here in the 1870s. He built a mercantile, cotton gin and dance hall, and conveyed land for school, the town became know as Gruene in 1903, a boll weevil infestation destroyed the cotton crop in 1925 and signaled the decline of the town. Restoration effort begun in the 1970s revitalized the area, the town was listed in the Natonal Register of Historic Places in 1975. (1988)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Gruene Historic District — steps away
  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 — 3.1 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.
• Natural Bridge Caverns — 15 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 — 15 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

• Original Gruene Mercantile — steps away
• Ferdinand J. Lindheimer — 1.8 mi
• New Braunfels — 2.4 mi
• Comal County — 2.5 mi