"Hindsights" by Michael Barr

Looking back at
The Martin House
on Hedwig's Hill

But a quiet life at his log house on the lonely Texas frontier was not in the cards for Louis Martin. He held dangerous and unpopular opinions. Like most Germans, he was no friend of the southern confederacy, and his outspoken criticism of slavery rubbed bad-tempered secessionist neighbors the wrong way.

During the Civil War he angered confederates even more by doing business in a manner that circumvented rebel authority. He freighted cotton and other products to Piedras Negras, Mexico, sold his produce to foreign agents for gold and returned to Hedwig's Hill with smuggled goods unavailable through blockaded confederate ports.

In June 1864 Martin and his nephew, Eugene Frantzen, started for the Rio Grande with a wagonload of salt pork and cured bacon. With a little luck they hoped to make the 200 mile trip to Piedras Negras in two weeks.

They arrived in Uvalde right on schedule, but then their luck ran out. On June 14, 1864, bandits following from Mason County waylaid the Germans at the Nueces River crossing south of town. The outlaws hung Martin and Frantzen and stole a sack of gold hidden in a side of bacon.

A week later a group of tattered men stopped at the Martin house at Hedwig's Hill. It was no social call. The men forced Elizabeth Martin to cook their supper; then before they rode away they proudly confessed to her that they murdered her husband and his nephew and took the gold.

Although Elizabeth recognized faces in the crowd, she never reported the incident to the authorities. She was afraid the desperadoes would harm her children.

Then in December Elizabeth drove a buckboard to South Texas and brought the bodies of her husband and his nephew home for burial. On the return trip she stopped in Fredericksburg for funeral supplies. Her journal reads, "Two coffins: two dollars and fifty cents."

She buried the men in a common grave in Der Stadt Friedhof (the City Cemetery) in Fredericksburg.