Schertz

Schertz stayed a village for most of a century. In 1890 it had a cotton gin, a grocery and about 200 residents, and by 1914 a church, a bank and a hotel. Its population held near 350 from the early 1930s through the late 1950s, and when the town incorporated in 1958 it counted 351. Then Interstate Highway 35 and San Antonio's outward growth arrived: 2,281 residents within six years, 7,576 by 1988, and 10,555 in 1990, when the city spread into Comal County. By 2015 Schertz had 36,244 residents.

What the plaque says

Schertz The first settlers in this community were German immigrants from the New Braunfels area who arrived in the 1840s in search of good farm land. The early economic base of the community was agricultural. The arrival of the Galveston, Harrisburg, and San Antonio Railroad about 1877 gave the town a link to San Antonio and enabled goods to be shipped to other parts of the state. Known in earlier days as Cibolo Pit and Cutoff, the name Schertz, honoring early area settler Sebastian Schertz (1822-1890), was adopted when the post office was established in 1882. (1984)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Natural Bridge Caverns — 9.8 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.
• Sophienburg Museum and Archives — 13 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 — 15 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.
• The Alamo — 16 mi
  Mission San Antonio de Valero before it was a fort: a church its builders never finished, a thirteen-day siege in 1836, and the Army gable of 1850-52 that became its emblem.

More markers nearby

• Edens Cemetery — 2.0 mi
• Harrison and McCulloch Stage Stop — 2.3 mi
• Site of Geier and Schmid Farm — 2.5 mi
• St. Paul Church — 2.7 mi