Monument Hill and Kreische Brewery State Historic Sites

Two histories share the bluff south of La Grange. The first is a tomb. In September 1842, after Adrián Woll's army took San Antonio, Nicholas Dawson raised fifty-three men, most of them from Fayette County, and rode to join Mathew Caldwell on Salado Creek. Mexican cavalry and two field guns caught them in a mesquite thicket on September 18, and thirty-six Texans died there, Dawson among them; of the fifteen taken to Perote Prison, nine came home. The tomb also holds men of the Mier expedition who drew black beans in the lottery of March 1843. Their remains were brought here and reburied together in September 1848.

The second is a brewery. Heinrich Ludwig Kreische, a stonemason from Saxony, bought 172 acres including the tomb in 1849, built a three-story stone house, and in the 1860s used the spring water in the ravine below it to start one of the first commercial breweries in Texas. Bluff Beer sold across Central Texas until 1884, two years after his death, and the brewery is now a set of stone ruins on the slope.

The 48-foot shellstone shaft over the vault went up for the 1936 Centennial, with the overlook across the Colorado River valley beside it. A new visitors center is under construction, so a temporary one stands by the parking lot. Trails, picnic grounds and the Kreische house are open daily.