Hochheim (Hoch's Home)

Valentine Hoch left Alsace-Lorraine with a family and lost two of them on the way: his youngest child died days before they sailed, and his wife died after they landed at Indianola and was buried there. A stonemason, he finished a two-and-a-half-story house of Guadalupe riverbank stones in 1856 and inscribed it V. Hoch-1856. He later remarried and adopted his new wife's three daughters. The settlement was called Hochheim, and sometimes Dutchtown. A storm damaged the house in 1934, and it was restored in 1954. Public access to it is not documented.

What the plaque says

Hochheim (Hoch's Home) Founded near home and stage stand of Valentine Hoch on old Austin - Indianola Road, 1856. In 1864, German Methodist Church was built; post office opened 1869. County's first Protestant church (organized 1841 on Cuero Creek by J. M. Baker and James N. Smith) moved here in 1882 as Hochheim Presbyterian Church. The Baptist church was founded later (1923). Concrete Lodge No. 182, A. F. & A. M. (Chartered 1856 with F. J. Lynch, first worshipful master), became Hochheim Lodge, 1884, buying (1885) upper story of schoolhouse for Lodge Hall; in 1921 bought lower story, housing school until 1938. (1972)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Spoetzl Brewery — 12 mi
  The brewery a Czech and German railroad town started in a tin shed in 1909, run through Prohibition by a Bavarian who had brewed in Cairo, and then by his daughter.
• Chisholm Trail Heritage Museum — 14 mi
  A cattle-country museum in Cuero's 1903 Knights of Pythias Hall, telling the Guadalupe Valley's 1866 drive north and the Sutton-Taylor feud that bloodied DeWitt County.
• Gonzales Memorial Museum — 17 mi
  A 1937 Centennial museum for the Immortal Thirty-two who died at the Alamo, holding the small iron cannon Gonzales calls its Come and Take It gun and the Handbook calls a second one.
• Lavaca County Courthouse — 23 mi
  A limestone Romanesque courthouse of 1897-99 on the square of a town founded by a widow trader, in a county seat that once printed the Socialist Party's state paper.

More markers nearby

• Cuero I Archeological District — steps away
• Hochheim Cemetery — 0.3 mi
• Concrete College — 4.3 mi
• Dr. William Watt White — 5.8 mi