Comfort was settled in 1852 by Germans from New Braunfels, among them freethinkers and political liberals from Sisterdale and Bettina, who ran the town on cooperative lines and did not build a church until 1892. In the Civil War it was a center of Union sentiment, and it lost many of its young men in 1862.
That August a party of Hill Country Unionists, mostly German, set out for Mexico under Maj. Fritz Tegener. On the morning of August 10, ninety-four mounted Confederates under Lt. C. D. McRae attacked their camp on the west bank of the Nueces. Nineteen Unionists were killed in the fight and the nine wounded were executed a few hours later; more were killed in October trying to cross into Mexico. Confederates called it action against insurrectionists. Many in the German Hill Country called it a massacre, and the accounts still disagree.
After the war the remains were brought to Comfort and buried here, and the monument was dedicated on August 10, 1866, honoring the Germans and one Hispanic man who died. It was rededicated on the 130th anniversary in 1996. It is the only German-language monument to the Union in the South that stands over the graves of those killed, and a thirty-six-star flag of 1866 flies at half-staff. It is a burial ground; visit with that in mind.
The closest stops worth working into your route
Roadside plaques and monuments within a short detour