Schoenthal School

The school served a farm settlement laid out in 1851, when land of the M. Gallardo survey was divided into farms. The place was first called Haag's Settlement, and the Haag's Settlement school went up in 1865; by the 1880s the community was known as Schoenthal, German for pretty valley. Nearby Bat Cave once yielded 1,000 tons of bat guano a year. The school now stands within Garden Ridge, which incorporated on April 4, 1972, the first new town in Comal County in 127 years, and grew from 230 residents that year to 1,450 by 1990.

What the plaque says

Schoenthal School Incorporated into the present structure is the Schoenthal School, built in 1872. A late example of the German fachwerk style of architecture. (1972) Incise on base: Erected by Mr. and Mrs. W. N. Deason, Jr. and family.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Natural Bridge Caverns — 3.6 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 — 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.
• Gruene Historic District — 13 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 — 19 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

• Natural Bridge Caverns — 3.4 mi
• Harrison and McCulloch Stage Stop — 5.0 mi
• Site of Geier and Schmid Farm — 5.6 mi
• Schertz — 6.4 mi