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At
this point, I will stop long enough to discuss a single voyage of especial interest,
that of the 1,347-ton "Ben Nevis," a clipper ship built in Canada in 1852,
and one of the largest of its day, which carried Pastor Johann Kilian and 588
members of his Wendish congregation from the provinces of Saxony and Prussian
Lusatia in Germany in September, 1854, to Serbin,
Texas, now in Lee County but then a part of Bastrop County until 1874. Large
or not, the "Ben Nevis" was only 146 feet long, meaning that the 588 people were
stuffed into a space not even as long as the city lot your home is built upon.
Pastor Kilian and Pastor C. F. W. Walther of Missouri, the founder of our Missouri
Synod, had been students together at the University of Leipzig, and indeed, many
believe it was Pastor Walther who induced these Wends to migrate to Texas at a
time when most of the Wends were migrating to Australia. Of the 588 Wends who
left Hamburg on that first voyage in 1854, 76 of them died along the way, mostly
of cholera, which they caught in Liverpool, England, but many of them died of
diarrhea as well. When the "Ben Nevis" docked at Galveston
on December 16th, about 3 months later, only 512 of them were still alive when
the plague ship was placed under quarantine by the customs department. Although
one of every 8 people died en route, the loss was still below average for immigrant
ships from Germany, where usually the loss was one in every six people. One book
commented on how clean the immigrants had kept the "Ben Nevis" at a time when
the only thing that smelled worse than an immigrant ship at Galveston was a slave
ship arriving from West Africa. Indeed, many slave ships that arrived in the New
World from West Africa suffered less loss of life than the "Ben Nevis" did.
But the Wendish colony's troubles were not over. When the 512 immigrants arrived
in Houston, then a town of 2,300 people,
shelter could be found only for the small children, and most people had to sleep
on the cold ground during the month of January. Those with money left over bought
ox carts and began the 200 mile journey overland to Serbin.
Of course, many of them had no money left and had to walk, and it was late in
March before the congregation was reassembled at Serbin, having spent the entire
winter around camp fires.
Other than Pastor Kilian, the following families
aboard the 'Ben Nevis" appear to be the ancestors of many of our Holy Cross and
Trinity Lutheran Church members, as follows: the families of Andreas Kieschnick,
Johann Kieschnick, Johann Carl Teinert, whose wife Maria died and was buried at
sea; -- Wukasch, whose first name is unreadable on the ship's register and whose
descendants are enrolled at both Holy Cross and Trinity; Matthaus Domaschk and
4 Noack families, these being well-known Port
Arthur surnames, Georg Caspar, Christian Kaspar, Johann Kubitz, Andreas Miertschin,
whose descendent Harry Miertschin formerly belonged to this congregation, and
whose brother, Rev. Elmo Miertschin, is the LCMS chaplain at Methodist Hospital;
Johann Biar, the ancestor of our Louis Biar; Matthaus Wagner, and Johann Knippa,
the latter's descendants being related to some of our members. Also, the progenitors
of the Fritsche, Moerbe, and Bohot families aboard the "Ben Nevis" have descendants
in the Sabine area.
As a matter of curiosity, I went to the census listings
of the Texas counties in search of some of these families, and for any of you
who may be interested, I found the same families grouped together there just as
they had been on the ship's register of the "Ben Nevis." Since Lee County did
not become a county until 1874, one must search for the Serbin census in Bastrop
County in the 1860 and 1870 census enumerations. However, the Lee County 1880
census reveals that a lot of children that were aboard the "Ben Nevis" had grown
up, married, and had children of their own. I found family names as follows: 3
Kieschnick families, 3 Kaspar families, 2 Domasckh families 5 Teinert families,
1 Kubitz family, 1 Noack family, 3 Biar families, 2 Miertschin families, and 5
Wukasch families, all in a matter of a few minutes.
Although
there is no evidence that subsequent German contingents suffered quite so badly
as the first ones, the risk of death while en route was always great. Occupants
of one early German immigrant ship at Galveston
died to the last person from yellow fever. In a 25-year span between 1835 and
1860, the yellow fever plague visited New Orleans annually in late summer and
early fall, and around 2,000 people died there each year of the plague. About
1830, my great grandmother Schmidt was orphaned as an infant there when both of
her parents died of yellow fever, and to this day no one has ever learned what
her true birth name was. In a 14-year period beginning in 1846, the Deutsche Gesellschaft
of New Orleans redirected 7,600 Germans to Texas, on one shipload of which the
Blocks traveled. That ship took refuge in Sabine Lake to escape a hurricane, and
it may have been a Godsend that that's as far west as any of them ever got. Otherwise,
my great grandparents, their daughter and eight sons might have died on that first
death march to New Braunfels.
Whether New Orleans, Galveston
or Indianola,
always the hardest ones hit by the yellow fever plague were the Irish and German
immigrants, who of necessity had to pass through and stay in the harbor and dock
areas, where that disease always concentrated. During 1845, 1848, 1853, and 1858,
about 500 people died of yellow fever each year at Galveston, and German immigrants
suffered badly on each occasion. During those antebellum years, the German population
of Galveston was about 40%, and in some parts of the city, German was the prevailing
language on the streets. In 1867, over 3,000 people died of yellow fever in the
Galveston Bay area, 1,100 of them in Galveston, and 1,900 more in Houston
and surrounding towns. In 1858, over 300 Germans died of yellow fever at Indianola.
In 1873, a severe epidemic of that plague broke out in Brenham
and Calvert, killing
hundreds, and fleeing refugees soon carried the disease in all directions. And
one doesn't need two guesses to determine what nationality of pioneer Texans bore
the brunt of that epidemic.
Even
the slow voyages of the immigrant sail boats were an exercise in endurance. Typically,
the voyage from Bremen to Galveston or Indianola required from three to 3 1/2
months, with up to 300 people closely cramped into the steerage quarters of sail
ships no more than 150 feet long. However, upon checking the passenger lists of
a several of those German immigrant ships of the 1845-1850 era, the usual number
of Germans aboard was between 100 and 200, these boats being considerably smaller
than the "Ben Nevis."The usual sailor and passenger fare was dried beef and hardtack,
with no fruit or fresh vegetables aboard, which led to such nutritional diseases
as scurvy, pellagra, diarrhea and dysentery. Normally, yellow fever victims had
a one in two chance of survival, but I'd wager that newly-arrived German immigrants,
after three long months at sea, were left with no bodily resistance with which
to fight off that dreadful disease that so severely attacks one's liver functions.
There was one other German emigration scheme, that of 'impresario' Henry
Castro, who had obtained a fairly large land grant from Mexico, present-day Medina
County on the Medina River west of San Antonio. Early in 1844, Castro began recruiting
in the Catholic provinces of Alsace, Swabia, Baden-Wurtemberg, Bavaria, and the
Rhineland. Castro's recruitment in Germany must have been quite fraudulent because
some people suggested in letters sent home that Castro be barred from returning
to Germany because of his extreme neglect of his colonists. Altogether, Castro
brought 2,134 families to Texas, founding colonies at Castroville,
D'Hanis, Hondo,
and Quihi, but he brought
them to an area where there was not one stick of timber to be found, only mesquite
underbrush and cactus. Hence, the colonists could choose to build their abodes
either out of sod or Mexican adobe. Although these towns retained a small number
of German settlers over the years, a majority of Castro's colonists eventually
moved into San Antonio. In 1850,
Medina County's population was about 65% German.
At
this time I am going to give you some figures on German immigration and the number
of Germans in Texas during the last century. And you will readily note that the
peak years of emigration to Texas came long after the Civil War. The figures are
estimates for some years and others are taken from census records for those years
ending in zero, as follows: for the year 1845--10,000 Germans in Texas; for 1850--28,000;
for 1860--35,000; for 1870--41,000; for 1880--86,400; for 1890--125,000; and for
1900---157,000 Germans.
By 1860 Galveston and Harris counties were 30%
German. Austin, Colorado, Dewitt, Fayette, Victoria, Calhoun, Washington, Lavaca,
and Lee counties were from 20% to 30% German, and San Antonio was 20% German.
Comal and Gillispie counties were 90% German and Kendall and Medina counties were
65% German. I might add that some counties that have sizeable German populations
today were not organized until after the Civil War.
In earlier days there
must have been 250 or 300 German or predominately German settlements, but time
will not permit me to name more than just a few of them. Some of the settlements
I am going to name may be today no more than a crossroads general store or may
be accredited to the wrong county because I had to work with some poor maps. There
were two settlements each named Blumenthal and Sisterdale. Generally, these settlements
can be described as the coastal and eastern group in Central Texas and the Hill
Country group in the west. Of the latter, there were in Kendall County the settlements
of Boerne, Comfort,
Sisterdale, Jungfrau,
Lindendale, Kendalia
and Bergheim. In Gillispie County were Doss,
Fredericksburg,
Cherry Springs,
Eckert, Cain City, Kreuzberg,
Rheingold, Luchenback,
and Blumenthal. In Medina County were Castroville,
D'Hanis, Hondo,
and Quihi. In Comal County
were New
Braunfels, Fischer,
Solms, Spring Branch, Gruene, Sisterdale, Farmer's Hall, Anhalt, Freiheit, Schoental,
and Wenzel.
As an example, Comal County in 1860 had 3,627 Germans, only
94 Anglo-Americans, and 193 slaves. The ten German slaveholders there are said
to have owned one female domestic slave each to assist the wife with household
chores and rearing children.
Along the coast, settlements in Dewitt
County included Yorktown, Weser, Cuero, Nordheim, Westhoff,
Fordtran, Meyersville, Arneckville, and Hochheim. In Lavaca County were Yoakum,
Henkhaus, Vienna, Shiner,
Hallettsville, Breslau,
Koerth, Wied, and Sweet
Home. Some of these counties also had a sizeable Czech or Bohemian population.
Fayette,
one of the eastern counties, enumerated Flatonia,
Schulenberg, Engle,
Lagrange, High
Hill, Waldeck, Round
Top, and West Point. In Colorado County were Weimar,
Bernardo, Columbus,
Frelsburg, New
Ulm, and Ellinger.
German settlements in Austin County included Cat
Spring, Industry, Welcome
and Bellville. And in Lee
County, where so many members of Holy Cross Lutheran Church have their origins,
were Giddings, Serbin
(the home of the Texas Wends), Lexington, Lobau and Warda.
Although there were many other settlements in other counties, time will not permit
me to digress farther. Even Port
Neches had 13 immigrant German families in 1880, most of whom I was related
to.
There were two other German settlements I need to deal with, even if
only briefly, both of them populated by those agnostic, abolitionist, intellectual
Free Thinkers who left Germany following the 1848 Liberal Revolutions. Forty men
made up the communist, agricultural colony of Bettina during the one year of its
life, with the intention of owning in common the land and whatever it produced.
Perhaps one key to its failure was the fact that seven men of the forty were lawyers,
whereas only one was a farmer. At any rate, during that year, about half of them
labored in the sun while the remainder preferred to rest in the shade, yet at
year's end, the latter were there, ready to share the harvest with the workers.
Needless to say, those forty settlers went their separate ways the following year.
One
of those forty was Gustav Schleicher, who later owned a mill in New Braunfels,
practiced law in San Antonio, and as a graduate engineer, built the San Antonio
and Mexican Gulf Railroad. During the Civil War, he served as a Confederate Major
of Engineers and helped build some of the forts at Sabine Pass. After 1872, he
was elected three times as U. S. Congressman from West Texas, and he died in Washington
in 1879. Schleicher County, south of San Angelo, is named after him.
Comfort,
Texas, was founded in 1854 by Ernst Altgelt, who gathered around him a large
nucleus of those agnostic, abolitionist Free Thinkers. So anti-religious was this
group that no church was built in Comfort until 1894, forty years later. Nevertheless,
some of the finest German American poetry, prose, music, and folk art were to
originate in that city, and in 1981 "Newsweek" named Comfort as one of its ten
best small American towns in which to reside.
Comfort
and Fredericksburg
were likewise centers of militant Unionism at the outbreak of the Civil War, which
was to give the Confederacy more headaches than it cared to contend with. Hundreds
from Kendall and Gillispie counties went north to serve in the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd
Texas Regiments of the United States Army, and of course, many of them were either
killed or never returned to Texas. Another group of Comfort men sought to escape
military service by fleeing to Mexico, and in 1862, they fought the Confederate
Regulars at the Battle of the Nueces River, where all of the Comfort men were
either massacred or captured.
The
Civil War brought very mixed feelings among the Germans. While Gillispie and Kendall
counties voted overwhelmingly against secession, the 3,600 Germans of Comal County
voted to secede from the Union. Many Germans also served in the Confederate Army.
Captain Charles Welhausen's battery of artillery, composed entirely of Fayette
County Germans, served at Fort Manhassett, Sabine Pass, with my grandfather, and
four of that battery were killed at the Battle of Calcasieu Pass, fought in May,
1864, at Cameron, Louisiana. An entire book, THE BIG GUNS OF FAYETTE, was written
about that battery by Judge Paul Boethel of Hallettsville. About 20 Germans from
Jefferson County served in the Confederate Army, including four Block brothers
from Port Neches, even though their father was a Unionist who refused to take
the oath of allegiance to the Confederacy.
The most illustrious of the
Texas Germans in the Confederate Army was Brig. General Augustus Buchel. A soldier
of fortune, he fought in wars in Spain and Turkey before arriving at Indianola
among those 6,000 ill-fated immigrants of 1845. Immediately he mustered a German
company of U. S. Infantry, and as its captain, they fought under Gen. Zachary
Taylor at the Battles of Resaca de las Palmas and at Buena Vista during the Mexican
War. As a Confederate cavalry colonel, Buchel raised the 1st Texas Cavalry Regiment
in 1861, and after the Battle
of Sabine Pass, Gen. Magruder of Houston sent Buchel to Sabine Pass to command
Confederate troops in Southeast Texas and Southwest Louisiana. On April 9, 1864,
Gen. Buchel was killed at Mansfield, Louisiana, while leading his brigade at the
Battle of Pleasant Hill.
A century in retrospect, what has been the heritage
left to us by this hardy band of German souls who, despite the oppression in Germany,
left the comforts of home to take up the trail and endure a long voyage at sea,
suffer untold hardships and even death in order to establish a better life for
themselves and their descendants in Texas? What we descendants call the good life
today, those immigrants knew only as raw wilderness, Indian raids, backbreak farm
labor, slow transportation, and a harsh scrub board, outdoor plumbing and candlelight
environment. Yet these same Germans brought the first educations, the best craftmen,
European-style stone architecture, the first brass bands, the best schools and
libraries, and the first 'saengerfests' or choral societies to the frontiers of
Texas. Everywhere they settled, the Germans set examples of what their own labor
could produce on their cotton plantations without the use of slaves. Yes, most
of the pianos and musical instruments in antebellum Texas were in the German homes.
They brought the best educators and educations in Europe to Texas, for the average
Anglo-Americans who lived on the outer fringes of civilization in that day rarely
could even read or write. They brought the best physicians, lawyers, teachers,
brewers, flour and corn millers, blacksmiths and wagon makers, machinists, brick
masons and carpenters to a frontier where those occupations were always in short
supply. Perhaps foremost, they brought the first journalists, poets, authors,
artists, sculptors, dramatic societies, and musicians to the frontier, which in
other words means the Germans brought the fine arts to Texas. For years there
were more German-language newspapers in Texas than there were English. Only in
1957 did the 110-year-old New Braunfels "Zeitung," the last and oldest of the
Texas German-language newspapers, cease publication.
I'll never forget
an experience my wife and I had in Oct., 1951, when we were passing through New
Braunfels. We stopped at a small cafe in the center of that city of about
35,000 people, and as we entered, the 10 or 12 people who were seated inside hurriedly
quit their German conversations and for 10 minutes you could have heard a pin
drop except for my words when I ordered coffee and pie. In a town of that size,
they could still discern we were "fremdervolk," that is, strangers in town. After
paying, I looked back as we went out the door and already their jawbones once
more were going full blast in German.
About 25 years ago, an old German
named Otto Figge died here in Nederland. He was a brilliant old man, about age
95, who spoke four languages. He once old me he arrived in New Braunfels in 1885.
He liked the town, but the strangest thing he said he found there were black people
who spoke German but no English. Apparently these people had grown up as young
slaves in the households of German families, and had never had any occasion to
learn English.
Perhaps you might be wondering what ever happened to Carlshafen
or Indianola,
the German seaport of the "Adelsverein" near Port
Lavaca. In August, 1875, it was hit by huge hurricane, one so large that it
almost destroyed Wallisville, the Trinity River town that was then the county
seat of Chambers County. Indianola was totally destroyed, with many Germans drowned,
but those hardy folks immediately set about to rebuild it. Eleven years later,
in August, 1886, the second of those Gulf whirlwinds razed the town. Even as the
winds were ripping apart the timbers, the town also caught fire and it succumbed
completely to the flames, the winds and the waves. Over 300 people drowned. The
town was never rebuilt and out of its ashes came the present-day city of Corpus
Christi, some miles to the southwest. All that is left of Indianola today
are a few concrete foundations out in the marsh.
I have only just begun
to realize what a great volume of historical literature now exists on Texas German
history, a great deal of it being available in Texas in books and journals, but
a much larger amount being written here but published in Germany, where generally
it is not available to historians here. Biographical writings about a large number
of these German immigrant men is available, some of whom some of you may be descended
from. Two book I have checked from Lamar Library list several thousands of the
Germans who arrived between 1845 and 1861, including what boat they were on, where
they came from, etc. Two other books that I have here list the 110 families on
the first boat load of Wendish Germans who settled in Serbin,
Texas in 1854. Apparently, the book that does not exist is a volume on those
pioneer Texas German women who left equally as great a legacy and surely some
one needs to write a book about them. Among some of the better known of the pioneer
German immigrant women were Johanna Wilhelm, Emma Altgelt, artist Louisa Wueste,
artist Edna Bierschwale, Clara von Below, Caroline von Roeder, Rosa Kleberg, historians
Caroline von Hinueber and Luisa Stoehr, Vera Flach, author Ottilie Goeth, Caroline
Grobe, poet Selma von Metzenthin-Raunick, sculptress Elisabet
Ney, Betty Holekamp, and Ida Kapp.
I honestly believe it would take
a full day to do justice to this subject, but alas, I would certainly wear out
my listeners first. I appreciate your kind attention, and I hope that somewhere
among these words, you have become better acquainted with our forebearers who
have left us the great legacy we enjoy today. It has been a joy for me to be here
and I thank you.
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