Wandke House

Wandke's name rests on a handful of instruments, and his own notebooks survive beside them. He reached Galveston from Bremen in 1855 at 47, a man who had repaired watches, worked tin, made locks and built church furniture, with no firm evidence he had ever built an organ. Before his death in 1870 he made seven, with hand-planed wooden pipes and hand-turned wooden screws; three survive. His German journals, now at the Briscoe Center, include an organ-building manual full of calculations, a hymn list, an account of the crossing and a book of charms and cures.

What the plaque says

Wandke House Johann Traugott Wandke (1808-1870) immigrated from Prussia to nearby La Grange with his wife Christiane and two daughters, Karoline and Christiane, in 1855. About 1860 Johann and Christiane came to Round Top to live in the home of their daughter Karoline and her husband Zoellistin Pochmann. They built their own native stone home/workshop at this site about 1863. Johann was a skilled mechanic and cabinetmaker but is best known for the high-quality organs he crafted from native cedar for several churches in the area including Round Top's Bethlehem Lutheran Church. Sesquicentennial of Texas Statehood 1845-1995

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Round Top and Festival Hill — steps away
  A German village on the old La Bahía Road, named for a house tower, with an 1867 stone church, a Fourth of July kept since 1851 and a concert hall a pianist built without blueprints.
• Lake Somerville State Park and Trailway — 15 mi
  Two park units on an 11,000-acre lake between Austin and College Station, joined by a thirteen-mile trailway for hikers, cyclists and riders with primitive camps along the way.
• Monument Hill and Kreische Brewery State Historic Sites — 16 mi
  A shared tomb on the Colorado River bluff for the men of the Dawson fight and the black bean lottery, beside the ruins of a German stonemason's spring-fed brewery.
• Texas Wendish Heritage Museum — 18 mi
  A museum at Serbin of the Wends, a Slavic people from Lusatia whose congregation of nearly 600 crossed on the Ben Nevis in 1854, losing seventy-three to cholera on the way.

More markers nearby

• Pochmann House — steps away
• Schiege House — steps away
• Schiege Cigar Factory — steps away
• Early Texas Hotels and Inns — steps away