Sattler

The community's other names came from its institutions: Mountain Valley from the school and Walhalla from the Walhalla Singing Club, organized in 1877. William Sattler, whose home held the first post office, had settled at Comal Town in 1846 and at Mountain Valley in 1853. Part of the community reached into Hidden Valley, settled in 1863, more than 1,000 acres of farmland on the west bank of a Guadalupe bend. Sattler had about twenty-five residents until after World War II and was nearly deserted by the 1950s before the lake revived it.

What the plaque says

Sattler German immigrants were the first to colonize permanently this area along the Guadalupe River in the 1850s. The dispersed rural community was known at times as Marienthal, Walhalla and Mountain Valley, with the name Sattler assigned when the post office, first opened in 1856 at the Wilhelm Sattler home, was more centrally located in 1880. The Weil-Nowotny-Guenther store, with its complex of buildings-post office, dance hall, cotton gin and bowling alley-served as a gathering place for farm and ranch families who lived in the area. Construction of Canyon Dam in the 1960s hastened the dispersal of the German community, but the heritage of Sattler remains significant in the History of Comal County. (2002)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Gruene Historic District — 8.6 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.
• Sophienburg Museum and Archives — 11 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

• German Pioneers in Texas — 1.7 mi
• Startzville Community — 5.9 mi
• Gruene — 8.6 mi
• Original Gruene Mercantile — 8.6 mi