"Treue Der Union"

Many men honored here belonged to the Union League, a militia organized around Comfort to protect parts of Kendall, Gillespie and Kerr counties from Indian raids and from Confederate actions. Of those who escaped the Nueces fight, eleven reached home, and most of the others got away for a time to Mexico or to California. Some survivors, John W. Sansom among them, eventually joined Union forces headquartered in New Orleans. Of the many conflicting accounts of the battle, the Handbook of Texas judges the one Sansom published in 1905, as a military professional, the most reliable and complete.

What the plaque says

"Treue Der Union" ("Loyalty to the Union") This German language monument, erected 1866, honors the memory of 68 men (mostly Germans) from this region who were loyal to the Union during the Civil War. Trying desperately to reach U.S. Federal troops by way of Mexico, about 40 of the men were killed by vengeful Confederates bent on annihilating them, in the Battle of the Nueces (on Aug. 10, 1862) and a later fight (Oct. 18). The bodies of the slain and those who drowned swimming the Rio Grande were left unburied. A group of Germans gathered the bones of their friends and buried them at this site in 1865. (1968)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Treue der Union Monument — steps away
  An 1866 German-language monument in Comfort over the graves of Hill Country Unionists killed at the Nueces in 1862, its flag of thirty-six stars kept at half-staff.
• Old Tunnel State Park — 11 mi
  A railroad tunnel abandoned in 1942 that now shelters up to three million Mexican free-tailed bats, who fly out each evening from May through October.
• Schreiner Mansion — 15 mi
  The 1879 downtown home of Charles Schreiner, the Alsatian-born merchant, banker and rancher whose store and mohair trade built Kerrville.
• Luckenbach — 17 mi
  A store, saloon and dance hall on Grape Creek that a humorist bought in 1971, declared a free state of mind, and turned into a pilgrimage for Texas music.

More markers nearby

• Freidenker — steps away
• Comfort Community Theatre — 0.4 mi
• Peter Joseph Ingenhuett Homestead — 0.4 mi
• Hermann and Antoine Ingenhuett Homestead — 0.5 mi