On a warm November evening in New Braunfels, the smell of grilling sausage drifts off the Wurstfest grounds, an accordion strikes up a polka, and a town of more than a hundred thousand people sounds, for a moment, like a village on the Rhine. The Germans in New Braunfels did not simply pass through this corner of the Texas Hill Country. They built it, named it after a castle on the Lahn, and stamped their language, their dance halls and their sausage onto a place that still answers to that inheritance nearly two centuries later.
The Place
New Braunfels sits about 25 miles northeast of San Antonio, at the meeting of the Guadalupe and Comal Rivers in the southern reaches of the Texas Hill Country. It is the seat of Comal County and the principal junior partner in the San Antonio metropolitan area.
The Comal Springs here form the largest spring complex in Texas and feed the Comal River, one of the shortest navigable rivers in the United States at roughly 2.5 miles, its spring water holding steady around 70 to 72 degrees year round.
Those rivers are why the town is prosperous and why it keeps growing. New Braunfels counted 91,640 people at the 2020 census and has surged past 120,000 since, drawing families with a median household income in the mid 80,000s of dollars and a low poverty rate. It is a place built on cool water, German bones, and a steady stream of newcomers.
How It Became German
The noblemen’s plan
The story begins not in Texas but on the Rhine. In 1842 a group of German noblemen organised the Adelsverein, formally the Society for the Protection of German Immigrants in Texas, at Biebrich near Mainz. Also called the Mainzer Verein, it was a scheme to channel emigrants from a crowded, hungry Germany into the new Republic of Texas.
The man sent to make it real was Prince Carl of Solms-Braunfels, a young cavalry officer who became the society’s first commissioner general. He arrived in Texas in July 1844 to scout, and the following year purchased roughly 1,300 acres on the Guadalupe River as a way station for settlers bound for the society’s distant Fisher-Miller land grant.
March 1845
The first immigrants landed in December 1844 near the coastal port the prince had named Carlshafen. From there, on 21 March 1845, the surveyor Nicolaus Zink led a wagon train of German settlers up to a site on Comal Creek that the prince had chosen, at the ford where the old San Antonio to Nacogdoches road crossed the river.
Prince Carl named the settlement New Braunfels after Braunfels, his family’s ancestral seat on the Lahn River in Germany. Before he sailed home in May 1845, he had seen a stockade rise on the bluff and work begin on the Sophienburg, the society’s hilltop headquarters named for his fiancee, Princess Sophia.
A German town takes root
What the prince left behind grew quickly. The Adelsverein’s emigration peaked in the mid 1840s, and the settlers who poured through Carlshafen and on to New Braunfels turned the raw townsite into a working German community of farmers, craftsmen, brewers and merchants within a generation.
They came with their institutions intact. Singing societies, shooting clubs, churches that preached in German, and a German language press took hold early, and the town’s newspaper, the Neu-Braunfelser Zeitung, carried the language in print for over a century. The town, as the standard histories put it, remained essentially German in character, much as the sister Hill Country colony chronicled in our account of the Germans in Fredericksburg, Texas, founded a year later by the same emigration society.
The Gruene chapter
A few miles to the northeast, a second German story unfolded. Ernst Gruene moved his wife and two sons to the area in 1872, and his son Henry, known as Heinrich, assembled enough cotton land to support some twenty to thirty tenant families.
Before his death in 1920, Henry Gruene had built the little settlement’s first mercantile store, cotton gin, lumberyard and bank, and in 1878 a dance hall that would outlast all of it. Today Gruene is a preserved historic district within New Braunfels, and that 1878 hall is the oldest continuously operating dance hall in Texas.
Holding on through the twentieth century
German communities across America largely buried their language during the two World Wars, when speaking German became suspect. New Braunfels felt that pressure too, and the everyday use of German slowly faded over the twentieth century.
But the town chose to perform its heritage rather than abandon it. In 1961 the city’s meat inspector, Ed Grist, dreamed up a small sausage festival, and the mayor proclaimed a November day to honour the town’s German past. Held that first year in the National Guard Armory, it drew about 2,000 people. That festival, Wurstfest, became the engine that kept German identity alive as a public celebration, the kind of heritage revival also seen in restored districts like the Germans in German Village, Columbus.
The Landmarks
Gruene Hall, 1281 Gruene Road. Built by Henry Gruene in 1878, this 6,000 square foot hall with its high tin roof, side flaps and shaded garden is Texas’ oldest continuously operating dance hall. Almost nothing has changed by design, and its small stage has hosted Willie Nelson, George Strait and Lyle Lovett among countless others.
Sophienburg Museum and Archives, 401 W. Coll Street. The museum sits on the hilltop where Prince Carl established the Adelsverein’s headquarters in 1845. Founded by residents in 1933, its archive is one of the largest repositories of German immigration records in Texas, holding more than a million photographs alongside newspapers, church records and oral histories.
Naegelin’s Bakery, 129 South Seguin Avenue. Opened in 1868 by Edouard Naegelin, a 24 year old born in Alsace-Lorraine who started with a single sack of flour, it is the oldest continuously operating bakery in Texas. The recipes for its strudel and German breads have scarcely changed in over 150 years.
The Faust Hotel, 240 South Seguin Avenue. Completed in 1929 as the Travelers Hotel and renamed in 1936 for the Faust family, the four storey building opened just two weeks before the stock market crash. Civic boosters built it to draw visitors back after a drought hammered the area’s farms in the mid 1920s.
The Wurstfest grounds, beside Landa Park. Since 1961 these grounds have hosted the ten day November festival that gives the town its loudest German voice, a swirl of sausage, polka, beer and the comic figure of the Wurst opa. From 2,000 visitors at the first event, it now draws hundreds of thousands each year.
Comal Springs and Landa Park. The largest spring complex in Texas wells up in Landa Park and becomes the Comal River, the cool, spring fed waterway that first drew the settlers and now floats roughly half a million tubers a season through the heart of town.
The Gruene Historic District. Founded by Ernst Gruene’s family in the 1850s, this cluster of nineteenth century buildings around the old water tower nearly died when the cotton economy collapsed, then was rescued and listed as a historic district. Its general store, restaurants and the famous hall now anchor the town’s heritage tourism.
Where They Came From
The Germans who founded New Braunfels were not a random scattering from across the German lands. The Adelsverein noblemen recruited heavily in their own home districts, and the immigrant clusters came overwhelmingly from west central Germany.
The largest contingents came from Nassau, Hesse, southern Hanover, Brunswick and western Thuringia. The pull of family and village ties shaped the flow. From the Dillkreis in Nassau, the home county of the colony’s later leader John O. Meusebach, some thirty four villages sent emigrants to Texas. Those same west central German provinces fed German settlements far beyond Texas, from the Germans in New Ulm, Minnesota to the close knit community profiled in the Germans in Cullman, Alabama.
This was chain migration in its classic form. A letter home from a settler who had survived the crossing and found land was worth more than any nobleman’s pamphlet, and whole networks of relatives followed the first arrivals across the Atlantic and up the Guadalupe to the Comal.
New Braunfels Today
New Braunfels in 2026 is one of the fastest growing cities in Texas, its population swollen by families chasing affordable space between San Antonio and Austin. Subdivisions now spread across land that grew cotton a century ago, and the newcomers are as likely to have Hispanic or Anglo surnames as German ones. The same corridor has drawn fast growing immigrant communities of every kind, including the populations described in our pieces on the Indians in Richardson, Texas and the Indians in Carrollton, Texas.
Yet the German frame holds. The town still markets itself on its founding story, the Sophienburg still keeps the archive, Naegelin’s still bakes the strudel, and Wurstfest still fills the November grounds. The heritage has shifted from a living everyday culture to a celebrated public one, but it remains the thing the town is known for.
It is worth being honest about that shift. The German language is largely gone from daily life, and the dirndls and lederhosen come out for festivals more than for Sundays. What endures is real all the same: the place names, the dance hall, the bakery, the spring fed rivers, and a civic memory that traces itself, without fail, back to a prince and a wagon train in the spring of 1845.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why are there so many Germans in New Braunfels, Texas?
The Germans in New Braunfels, Texas trace back to 1845, when the Adelsverein, a society of German noblemen, founded the town as a way station for emigrants from a crowded Germany. Prince Carl of Solms-Braunfels chose the site on the Comal River, and thousands of Germans followed through the coastal port of Carlshafen.
Who founded New Braunfels and when?
New Braunfels was founded on 21 March 1845, when surveyor Nicolaus Zink led a German wagon train to a site chosen by Prince Carl of Solms-Braunfels. The prince named it after Braunfels, his family’s ancestral home on the Lahn River in Germany.
Where in Germany did the New Braunfels settlers come from?
Most came from west central Germany, chiefly the provinces of Nassau, Hesse, southern Hanover, Brunswick and western Thuringia, where the Adelsverein noblemen recruited in their home districts. The migration spread through family and village ties, with some thirty four villages in the Nassau county of Dillkreis alone sending emigrants.
What is Wurstfest and why does it matter?
Wurstfest is a ten day German festival held each November in New Braunfels, celebrating the town’s heritage with sausage, polka and beer. It began in 1961 as a small sausage event drawing about 2,000 people and now draws hundreds of thousands, keeping the German identity of the Germans in New Braunfels, Texas alive as a public celebration.
What is Gruene Hall?
Gruene Hall, built in 1878 by Henry Gruene, is the oldest continuously operating dance hall in Texas. It sits in the Gruene Historic District just northeast of downtown New Braunfels and has hosted artists from Willie Nelson to George Strait while remaining almost physically unchanged.
Is New Braunfels still a German town today?
New Braunfels is no longer German speaking in daily life, and rapid growth has made it far more diverse. But its founding story, the Sophienburg archive, Naegelin’s Bakery, the Gruene Historic District and the annual Wurstfest keep the German heritage central to the town’s identity.
If your family’s story passed through New Braunfels, or any of the places Germans have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a village in Nassau or Hesse, to a wagon train on the Comal in 1845, to wherever you are now.