Guenther's Live Oak Mill

The San Antonio mill grew into a company that outlasted its founder by generations. Unable to build it alone, Guenther traded milling for the labor of Alsatian farmers from Castro's Colony, who helped dig the channel and raise the buildings. The mill ground local grain until 1876, when railroads first linked San Antonio to the grain lands of the Midwest, and Guenther also founded the Southern Ice Company. The business was incorporated in 1898 as C. H. Guenther and Son, trading as Pioneer Flour Mills, and his son Erhard ran it from 1902 to 1945.

What the plaque says

Guenther's Live Oak Mill By 1848, Carl Hilmar Guenther (1826-1902), master millwright, had completed his apprenticeship in Germany and immigrated to the U.S. In search of opportunities and a good grist mill site, he journeyed south from Wisconsin to New Orleans, and then west to Texas. In 1851 he bought land and water rights on Live Oak Creek near Fredericksburg. After six months of construction, his mill was operational, but a flood destroyed the first dam. One month after the floor the mill was working again. Ox drawn wagons loaded with harvested crops converged on the mill in the mornings, and after the farmers' business was completed the men remained to visit with each other. The mill became a center of social life in the Hill Country community Guenther was granted U.S. Citizenship in gillespie County in 1854. He married Dorothea Pape in 1855. They lived in a home near the mill and were eventually the parents of seven children. In 1859 Guenther chose a site about one mile from the center of San antonio as a new site for his mill operation. Guenther mills soon became the Pioneer Flour Mills, an enterprise which became a flourishing business in Texas and the Southwest. (1991)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Vereins Kirche and Main Street — 4.1 mi
  The octagonal Society Church on Fredericksburg's market square, rebuilt in stone in the 1930s, beside a main street laid out like a Rhine village.
• National Museum of the Pacific War — 4.1 mi
  A museum of the war in the Pacific in Chester Nimitz's hometown, dedicated at his request to the two million who served with him, with a garden given by Japan.
• Fort Martin Scott — 4.2 mi
  An army post of 1848 on Barons Creek beside the German town, where soldiers kept the peace of a Comanche trade and paid the merchants in hard cash.
• Luckenbach — 9.8 mi
  A store, saloon and dance hall on Grape Creek that a humorist bought in 1971, declared a free state of mind, and turned into a pilgrimage for Texas music.

More markers nearby

• Wunderlich Houses — 3.1 mi
• Fredericksburg Lodge No. 794, A.F. & A.M. — 3.2 mi
• Baethge-Behrend Homestead — 3.6 mi
• First Methodist Church of Fredericksburg — 4.0 mi