Rural charm and urban flair

By John Hallowell

A brief history of Boerne -- where San Antonio meets the Hill Country

Boerne’s beginnings were a little different than other Hill Country towns, and to tell the story well, we have to go back to the universities of Germany during the 1830s. A young Jewish writer named Loeb Baruch changed his name to Ludwig Borne (later Boerne) and began a series of articles criticizing the authoritarian German government. Although he was forced to flee to France, he continued to write, and his work attracted a loyal following among students and intellectuals in Germany. Although he died in 1837, many of those influenced by his writings became leaders in the fledgling European communist movement. After Texas gained its independence in 1836, many of these young idealists looked to its wide-open spaces as the perfect place to experiment with their utopian philosophies.

       In 1847, a year after the founding of Fredericksburg, a group of students (the self-styled “Group of Forty”) petitioned John O. Meusebach for a grant of land to establish a socialistic community on the Llano River. About thirty of them arrived in 1848 (the same year that Karl Marx published his “Communist Manifesto”), and set out to build an ideal community where each would give according to his abilities and receive according to his needs. They called their settlement Bettina, after Bettina von Arnim, a disciple of Borne who was well on her way to becoming a famous novelist in Germany.

       The experiment failed within a year, and many of the disillusioned communists went home to Germany. Several of them wandered south to Cibolo Creek, and founded another community named Tusculum, after Cicero’s summer home in ancient Rome. By the time that second experiment failed, the erstwhile communists had been joined by some more practical neighbors, and at last the foundation for a real, working town had been laid.

       John James was a surveyor (and a good capitalist) from Bexar County. With the backing of a San Antonio investor named Gustav Theissen, James bought 1,100 acres and laid out a townsite in 1852. At least four of the original Group of Forty moved to the new town, which was named for their hero, Ludwig Boerne. And although the town was slow in growing (just ten dirt-floored log cabins by 1858), it eventually caught on.

       The man who became probably Boerne’s greatest hero spent most of his life in San Antonio. Dr. Ferdinand von Herff was one of Bettina’s original Group of Forty, and although he eventually became a wealthy landowner, he never lost his early idealism. Dr. Herff was somewhat of a linguist, speaking five languages fluently before he came to Texas. He quickly learned the Apache and Comanche languages while at Bettina, and developed friendships in all the nearby tribes by providing exceptional medical care. He was truly a medical pioneer, and some of the surgeries he performed were the first of their kind in America. Unfortunately, while his medical wizardry won him many friends among the Indians, it didn’t usually pay very well. One Comanche brave, who had undergone a successful (open-air, without anesthesia or proper instruments!) cataract surgery, rewarded the good doctor by bringing him a beautiful Indian girl. “Now you have squaw,” he told Dr. Herff. The Indian girl lived with one of the female colonists until she married German settler Hermann Spiess a few years later. On another occasion, the Herff home was spared during an Indian rampage, when one of the braves placed an arrow with a white feather in his gatepost. When the famous chief, Geronimo, was at Fort Sam Houston in 1886, he asked to be seen by Dr. Herff, who had successfully operated on his squaw some years earlier!

       Dr. Herff returned to Germany after Bettina failed, and married his German sweetheart, Mathilde Klingelhofer. The couple came back to Texas and settled in San Antonio, where he made Texas history by performing the first perineal lithomy in the state, removing two large joined stones from the bladder of a Texas Ranger in 1854 (This information, by the way, is from a 1990 high school paper by Laura Heath, daughter of former Boerne mayor Patrick Heath, and now a doctor herself).

       Although Dr. Herff was a Union sympathizer, he served during the Civil War as a surgeon for the Confederacy. In 1869, he helped establish San Antonio’s first hospital (the Santa Rosa Hospital), and continued at the top of his profession for forty more years in San Antonio. In the meantime, he continued to show a great interest in the growth and progress of Boerne, helping to bring the railroad to town in 1887 by donating three-and-a-half miles right-of way and then helping to build St. Mary’s Sanitarium and the Holy Angels Academy there around 1890. He performed his last surgery in 1907; he died five years later, at the age of 92. Monuments to the famous doctor still exist in San Antonio and Boerne.

       Dr. Herff, like many of his peers from overcrowded Germany, placed a very high value on owning land. He bought 1,200 acres near Cibolo Creek in 1852, and added to his holdings through the years until he owned thousands of acres near Boerne. He and his descendents have donated parcels of land for many worthy causes, including the Cibolo Nature Center, the city park, the new high school and the county fairgrounds. Seven generations of his family have now enjoyed the Herff Ranch.

       Karl Dienger arrived in Boerne in 1855, and soon helped to form a German band and a shooting club. His band, and others like it, were thriving by the 1880s, and their descendents are still a fixture in Boerne today.

       Another man who greatly influenced Boerne’s development was Dr. W. G. Kingsbury, a prominent San Antonio dentist and the immigration agent for Texas. During the 1870s, he promoted Boerne at an office in London, bringing many English settlers to the mostly German town. A cricket team was formed (by the English, of course) in 1886. The two groups gradually merged.

       During that time, many beautiful wood-frame houses were built in Boerne, some of which remain today. Boerne became much more connected with the rest of the world in 1883, when the first telegraph wires were put up; then ever-so-much-more-so in 1887, when the railroad arrived. A trip to San Antonio, which had taken three days by ox-cart in 1860, and seven-and-a-half hours by stagecoach in 1880, now took only two-and-a-half hours. The train, along with Dr. Herff’s medical renown, brought a flood of visitors to Boerne’s healthful climate in the late 1800s. By the turn of the century there were six hotels and several sanitariums in Boerne, and the economy was booming.

       Two pillars of Boerne society during that time were Maximilian “Max” Beseler and William Kuhlmann. Beseler was a prominent merchant, who built the landmark Metropolitan Opera House and Saloon, along with several other businesses. Kuhlmann was a druggist who followed the “health” business to Boerne in 1883, and went on to build several of the finest buildings in town, including a sanitarium which now serves as the Hilltop Nursing Home. He was the first Boerne resident to own a car.

       Electricity came to Boerne in 1904, and the first county fair was held two years later. Cotton was king, and the town supported ten cotton gins when it was incorporated in 1909. Boerne hosted a minor league baseball team, and sometimes 2,000 fans would attend a game early in the 20^th century.

       The boll weevil put a stop to Boerne’s growth, wiping out the cotton crop in 1925. Four years later, the Great Depression closed many local businesses. Tourism died, and the railroad faded. With the exception of a huge centennial celebration in 1949, Boerne languished quietly through the middle of the century.

       Then, in the 1960s, growth from San Antonio began to affect Boerne. Most Americans drove cars by then, and when Interstate Highway 10 was built, Boerne became the destination of choice for thousands of city-dwellers. Fortunately, the growth and prosperity has not destroyed the small-town atmosphere of the previous century. And, also fortunately, the large number of visitors and newcomers has brought a multitude of amenities not normally associated with so small a town. Boerne is a vibrant community; a great place to visit or to live; a genuine Hill Country treasure. “Y’All come!”