New Braunfels

The river's source, the Comal Springs, is the largest group of natural springs in Texas. Water filtered through the Edwards limestone rises under artesian pressure from fissures along the Comal Springs fault to feed Landa Lake and the river. Damián Massanet found a large Indian encampment here in 1691, and the 1845 settlers called the springs Las Fontanas. They drove mills in the 1860s and a city hydroelectric plant from 1890 to 1950 and again after 1978. Their average flow from 1892 to 1978 was estimated at 9,000 liters a second, now threatened by a falling aquifer.

What the plaque says

New Braunfels Founded in Republic of Texas, 1845, by Prince Karl of Solms-Braunfels. Focal point of German immigration to central and western Texas. Sent men, goods to Confederacy, in Civil War. Historic, recreational, tourist center. Site of Landa Park and Sophienburg Museum. The Comal is known as shortest large-volume river in U.S. (1964)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sophienburg Museum and Archives — 1.9 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 — 2.3 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 — 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 — 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

• Comal County — steps away
• Near River Crossing Used by New Braunfels' First Settlers — 0.9 mi
• Ferdinand J. Lindheimer — 1.1 mi
• Texas Germans in the Civil War — 1.4 mi