At the time of the founding of the city, John O. Meusebach (below) was named the city's first Beschutzen (in German, “protector”). While rummaging through the museum, I stumbled upon another visitor, David Burck, a transplant from the Midwest who chose this German-sounding city looking at a map. In December 1845, Texas became a state of the United States of America, eliminating any ambition that the German aristocracy might have had to establish a German principality within the politically and militarily weak Republic of Texas, and undermining the United States.
And while German surnames occupy many of the city's 19th-century buildings, the use of the language seems to be limited to strange words in local store windows (usually Willkommen) and on restaurant menus. As the spring of 1845 progressed, settlers built Zinkenburg, a fort, divided the land and began building houses and planting crops. Opened in 1868, the establishment remains a landmark in the center of New Braunfels and a peculiar reminder of the German roots of the Lone Star State. Despite the fact that “New Germany never came to fruition,” New Braunfels persevered and today represents one of the most historic German-American communities in the United States.
Around the corner is the Phoenix Saloon, where a German entrepreneur and owner of the then called Back Room Café named William Gebhardt gave the world chili powder by inventing a machine to grind and dry fresh peppers. The city holds a German-style festival, the Wurstfest (sausage festival), every November to celebrate the city's German heritage. The largest of these secondary settlements was Fredericksburg, 80 miles northwest of New Braunfels. As hundreds of German immigrants continued to arrive on the Texas coast in 1846, three disasters affected German immigrants.
New Braunfels was first established as a German settlement in the spring of 1845 under the auspices of the Verein zum Schutze Deutscher Einwanderer in Texas. The Mexican-American war broke out between the United States and Mexico, and oxcart truckers hired to take the Germans and their belongings inland were diverted to the war effort along the south coast of Texas. In 1854, the Texas Supreme Court ruled in favor of Veramendi's heirs, however, after numerous court cases, a settlement was finally reached in 1879 in favor of NB citizens with the help of attorney Hermann Seele. New Braunfels was founded halfway between San Antonio and Austin in 1845 by a German prince who sought to found a colony in what was then the Republic of Texas.
The Society for the Protection of German Immigrants in Texas, also known as Adelsverein, was organized in the 1840s by German nobles to encourage mass emigration, both as a means of providing new opportunities for commoners in economic distress and of establishing foreign markets for Germans. industry. A second wave of German immigrants began to arrive in 1846, when the sponsor Adelsverein stumbled into bankruptcy.
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