Drive twenty-six miles west of San Antonio along Highway 90 and the Texas Hill Country quietly changes accent. Steep-roofed limestone cottages crowd narrow streets named Angelo and Paris and Lorraine, and a stone spire climbs 110 feet over a town of fewer than 3,000 people. This is Castroville, and the Germans of Castroville, Texas have a story unlike any other in the state: a German-speaking people who came not from Bavaria or the Rhineland but from Alsace, the contested borderland between France and Germany, carrying a dialect that has survived here for nearly two centuries.
The Place
Castroville sits in Medina County on a bend of the Medina River, the first settlement of any size between San Antonio and the old western frontier of the Republic of Texas. It covers under three square miles and recorded 2,954 residents in the 2020 census, a community small enough that nearly everyone knows the names carved on the headstones in St. Louis Cemetery.
It calls itself, without much exaggeration, the “Little Alsace of Texas”. The street grid was laid out in a park-like loop near the river to echo the villages of the old country, and the oldest houses were built the Alsatian way, with native stone, cypress timber and lime plaster. Castroville is the only town in the United States settled directly by colonists from the Alsace region, and that narrowness of source has kept its character remarkably intact.
How It Became German
The word “German” sits awkwardly on Castroville. Its ancestors spoke a Germanic dialect, kept German surnames and ate German-descended food, yet they came from a French department and many would have called themselves Alsatian first. The settlement was, in the most literal sense, German-speaking, and that is the thread this story follows.
Henri Castro and the empresario contract
The town owes its existence to one improbable man. Henri Castro was born in 1786 to a Sephardic Jewish family in St. Esprit, near Bayonne in south-western France. He had served as a consul, crossed the Atlantic, and by the early 1840s had attached himself to the cause of the young Republic of Texas.
On 15 February 1842 the Republic granted Castro an empresario contract. In exchange for more than a million acres of land west of San Antonio, he was to introduce at least 600 families or single men within three years and establish settlements on a dangerous, contested frontier. To recruit them he promised each head of a family 640 acres and each single man 320.
The crossing, 1843 to 1847
The first colonists left France in 1843, a party of 114 who sailed for the Texas coast. By the summer of 1844 six more ships had carried roughly 700 more. Between 1843 and 1847 Castro introduced more than 2,100 colonists to Texas, a recruitment effort second in scale only to that of Stephen F. Austin.
Most came not evenly from across Alsace but from the department of Haut-Rhin, the Upper Rhine, and within it from villages in a roughly twenty-five-mile radius between Colmar and Mulhouse. They were overwhelmingly Catholic farmers, German-speaking by dialect though French by passport, leaving a crowded, partitioned homeland for the promise of land.
Founding on the Medina, September 1844
Castroville was founded on 3 September 1844. The site on the Medina was exposed and remote, still within reach of Comanche and Apache raids, and the early years were hard. The colonists joined a frontier already populated by Mexican families and a scattering of other settlers, and had to build everything from the river stone up.
They did so quickly and in the manner they knew. The earliest cottages went up in the fachwerk and stone styles of the Sundgau and the Rhine valley: low, steep-roofed, hugging the street. A Catholic parish formed almost at once, dedicated to St. Louis, the crusader king of France whose name the colonists carried as patron.
The town that stayed itself
What is striking about Castroville is what did not happen. Many German-Texan settlements were absorbed into the wider Anglo-Texan world, their language fading within a generation or two. Castroville held on far longer: partly its isolation, partly the tight Catholic parish at its centre, partly the same handful of families marrying within the community.
Surnames recur across the generations like a refrain. Haby, Tschirhart, Tondre, Rihn, Dubuis, Schmidt, Haller, Pingenot: read the colonist rolls of the 1840s, then the storefronts and headstones of today, and you find the same names. Jacob Haby and Lorenz Rihn were among the original colonists, and their descendants still run businesses on the old highway.
Architecture as memory
By 1970 the heart of the old town was formally recognised. The Castroville Historic District was added to the National Register of Historic Places on 3 April 1970, taking in roughly 420 acres bounded by the Medina River and the original colonial streets. Its surveyed structures date from 1844 into the 1880s, including the Landmark Inn of around 1844, the old St. Louis Church of 1846, the Claude M. Dubuis House of 1847, and the F. Xavier Schmidt and Louis Haller houses of the 1870s.
These were not built as museum pieces but as the everyday houses of working Alsatian families, and the fact that so many survive is why the town can still be read as a single Alsatian village transplanted onto Texas limestone.
The Landmarks
St. Louis Catholic Church, Angelo Street, Castroville. The third and grandest church of the parish was built of native limestone and cypress between 1868 and 1870, its spire rising 110 feet over the town. Acclaimed a Texas Historic Landmark in 1970, it remains the spiritual centre of the community its founders served, ornately carved altars and stained glass intact.
Landmark Inn State Historic Site, 402 Florence Street, Castroville. Built by a Swiss immigrant in the late 1840s and converted to an inn in the early 1850s, this stone building still takes guests. Its six-acre grounds run down toward the Medina and preserve an original kitchen and a grist mill, a working glimpse of the colony’s first economy.
Steinbach Haus, 802 London Street, Castroville. Perhaps the most extraordinary object in town, this small house was built by the Steinbach family between 1618 and 1648 in the village of Wahlbach, in the Sundgau of Alsace. In 1998 it was dismantled, shipped to Castroville as a gift from the people of Alsace, and reassembled by French and local craftsmen, opening to the public in 2002. It now serves as the town’s visitors centre.
Haby’s Alsatian Bakery, 207 Old US Highway 90 East, Castroville. Opened by Stanley Haby in 1940 and bought in 1974 by Sammy and Yvonne Tschirhart, who expanded it into its present European-Alsatian form in 1983. The cases hold fruit-filled stollen and kugelhopf, the slightly sweet ring cake Alsatians eat for breakfast with butter and jam.
Dziuk’s Meat Market, Castroville. A quarter-mile west of Haby’s, this market still makes Alsatian sausage in two forms, fresh and dried, seasoned with beef, pork and coriander to a recipe carried over from the Rhine valley. It is the kind of place where the old foodways are kept alive by simply continuing to sell them.
Old St. Louis Church, Castroville Historic District. The 1846 stone church, one of the parish’s earliest, still stands within the historic district. It marks the first decade of settlement, when the colony was scarcely two years old and the river crossing west of San Antonio was still the edge of the frontier.
Koenig Park, on the Medina River, Castroville. Every August this riverside park hosts St. Louis Day, the parish picnic that has run for well over a century. What began as a gathering of a handful of families funded by a $25 outlay now draws around 10,000 visitors, opened with Holy Mass and sustained by Alsatian sausage and song.
Where They Came From
The Germans of Castroville were, more precisely, Alsatians, and the geography of their origin is unusually tight. Studies of Alsatian emigration to Texas in this period find that the overwhelming majority, around 94 per cent, came from the department of Haut-Rhin, the southern, upper stretch of French Alsace along the Rhine.
Within Haut-Rhin they clustered in the Sundgau and the plain between Colmar and Mulhouse, a landscape of small Catholic farming villages like Wahlbach, the home of the Steinbach Haus. They spoke Alsatian, a Germanic dialect of the Upper Rhine, rather than standard French, which is why Castroville reads as a German-speaking town despite its French address.
They left for the reasons that drove so much European emigration in the 1840s: land hunger, partible inheritance that split farms into unworkable slivers, and the unsettled politics of a borderland that had changed hands and would change again. Castro’s offer of hundreds of acres was, for a Sundgau farmer with too many sons, almost unimaginable.
Castroville Today
Castroville today is a small, well-kept Hill Country town that has learned to live partly on its own past. The historic district draws weekend visitors from San Antonio who come for the Alsatian bakeries, the antique shops and the steep-roofed houses, and the town leans into the “Little Alsace” identity in its signage and its festivals. The St. Louis Day picnic each August remains the real homecoming, a parish event that long ago outgrew the parish.
The hardest truth is about the language. Texas Alsatian, the dialect that once filled the town’s homes and shops, is now spoken by only a small and ageing population. Linguist Karen Roesch’s study of the dialect, published in 2012 as the first full description of Texas Alsatian as it survives in Medina County, concluded soberly that it has not passed to younger generations and will likely endure for only another two or three decades.
And yet the bones of the place hold. Families named Haby and Tschirhart and Tondre still run the bakery and the meat market and sit in the pews at St. Louis. The Steinbach Haus, four centuries old, stands as a gift between two Alsaces, the one on the Rhine and the one on the Medina. The accent in the streets may be fading, but the town it built is still legibly, stubbornly itself. For more of the German story in the state, see our pieces on the Germans of New Braunfels, Texas and the Mexican community of nearby San Antonio.
Castroville’s experience also rhymes with German settlements far beyond Texas. The same impulse to build a piece of the old country on new ground shaped the Germans of Leavenworth, Washington, the communal colonists of Amana, Iowa, and the Germans of Cullman, Alabama. Each preserved a different fragment of a homeland left behind.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why are the Germans in Castroville, Texas called Alsatian rather than simply German?
The colonists came from Alsace, the borderland between France and Germany, and most specifically from the Haut-Rhin department. They held French citizenship but spoke a Germanic dialect, Alsatian, and kept German surnames and customs, which is why the Germans in Castroville, Texas are described as Alsatian-Texans.
Who founded Castroville and when?
Castroville was founded on 3 September 1844 by Henri Castro, a French-born empresario who held a contract with the Republic of Texas to settle colonists on land west of San Antonio. He recruited Alsatian families and introduced more than 2,100 colonists to Texas between 1843 and 1847.
Is the Alsatian dialect still spoken in Castroville?
Yes, but barely. Texas Alsatian survives among a small, ageing group of speakers in and around Castroville in Medina County. Linguist Karen Roesch’s research found it has not been passed to younger generations and is likely to last only another two or three decades.
What is the Steinbach Haus?
The Steinbach Haus is a small Alsatian home built between 1618 and 1648 in the village of Wahlbach in Haut-Rhin. It was dismantled, shipped to Castroville as a gift from the people of Alsace in 1998, reassembled by 2002, and now serves as the town’s visitors centre.
What can you see in the Germans in Castroville, Texas heritage district?
The Castroville Historic District, listed on the National Register in 1970, preserves limestone Alsatian cottages and key buildings including the 1868 to 1870 St. Louis Catholic Church, the Landmark Inn, and the old St. Louis Church of 1846. These show how the German-speaking colonists built their town.
What is St. Louis Day in Castroville?
St. Louis Day is the annual parish picnic held each August in Koenig Park on the Medina River, honouring the town’s patron saint. It began over a century ago as a gathering of a few families and now draws roughly 10,000 visitors, opening with Holy Mass and Alsatian food.
If your family’s story passed through Castroville, or any of the places German-speaking Alsatians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a Sundgau village between Colmar and Mulhouse, to a limestone cottage on the Medina River, to wherever you are now.