Near River Crossing Used by New Braunfels' First Settlers

The 1845 colonists followed a path opened by letters. In 1831 Friedrich Ernst, a gardener from the Grand Duchy of Oldenburg, received a grant of more than 4,000 acres in what is now Austin County. His letters home described Texas as a winterless land like Sicily, rich in game and fish, nearly free of taxes and open to anyone for a surveyor's fee. One appeared in a German newspaper and an emigrant guidebook, and a small, steady stream of settlers from northwestern Germany followed, founding the first rural communities of the German Belt well before the society's ships arrived.

What the plaque says

Near River Crossing Used by New Braunfels' First Settlers At the crossing of the San Antonio-Nacogdoches Road on the Guadalupe River (used earlier by some of Texas' most famous trail-blazers) about 200 German colonists ended a journey that had begun six months before, in Europe. Here, on Good Friday,1845, they founded the town of New Braunfels, named for the estate of Prince Solms-Braunfels, the commissioner-general of the German Emigration Society. Part of a wave of German colonists,1844-1847, this small group and others like it have left a distinctive mark on the heritage and culture of Texas. (1969)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sophienburg Museum and Archives — 1.1 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.
• Gruene Historic District — 2.8 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 — 17 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

• Texas Germans in the Civil War — 0.7 mi
• Comal County — 0.7 mi
• Home of Ferdinand Lindheimer — 0.8 mi
• Johann Michael Jahn — 0.8 mi