Author: Kenneth W. Fuchs

Articles from THE HIGHLANDER
Marble Falls, Texas
					
1.	May 14, 1970 –  
		Century-Old Krumm Home Offers Colorful And Historic Landmark

2.	August 19, 1971 –  
		Disaster At Dead Man’s Hole

3.	December 2, 1971 –  
		Horseshoe Bay Would Be Amazing To Old Adolph Fuchs, Pioneer

4.	February 10, 1972 –  
		Hill Country History . . . Adolf Fuchs – Pastor, Poet And Pioneer

5.	March 30, 1972 –  
		More On The Fuchs Place Is Revealed

6.	March 30, 1972 –  
		Talk of Texas:  Capitol Murder 

7.	January 4, 1979 –  
		'The German Fox' and 'Tiger Mill'

8.	January 11, 1979 –  
		From Brooklyn to Burnet County 

    

The Highlander
Marble Falls, Texas  				
Thursday, May 14, 1970

Century-Old Krumm Home Offers Colorful And Historic Landmark

by JANICE CLAYTON

	MARBLE FALLS--Burnet County abounds in history and lore and although countless historical sites have vanished into its soil, many have been preserved.
	An observant eye will catch a glimpse of one historical landmark on FM 2147, four miles southwest of Marble Falls which has been preserved.  The large three-story stone ranch house of the Karl Krumm family adds to the beauty of the hillside on which it is located.  An open expanse of green fields dotted with cattle in front of the beautifully, maintained old home completes a picture that has evidently eye escaped the of local artists.
	The history of its origin begins in 1845 when the Rev. Adolph Fuchs (pronounced Fox) and his family emigrated to Texas from Mecklenburg, Germany.  In 1844 Texas land papers had been offered for sale in Mecklenburg at very low prices.  It had been declared that land in Texas had no actual value as one needed only sufficient land for a house and fields, while there was free grazing land everywhere for cattle.  A number of these land papers were owned by Mayor Lueders in Marlow, Germany, who was a close friend of Fuchs.  Lueders’ brother had been killed in Texas during the War of Independence.  President Sam Houston had to pay each soldier with a league of land because there was no money in the state treasury.  The brother’s land was turned over to the mayor who upon learning that Fuchs was going to Texas offered the land to him.
	It took eight years, with numerous difficulties to overcome, before Fuchs gained possession of the land with aid of a land surveyor DeCordova.  One third of the land went to DeCordova.  One section of 1,000 acres was located on the Brazos River where the town of  Lueders is located.  Two other tracts of land of six hundred acres were sold by Fuchs.  He kept the land located on the Colorado River above Marble Falls.  Fuchs moved his family there from Cat Spring in Austin County in 1853.  They made their home on the Armin Matern Ranch.
	In Memoirs of a Texas Pioneer Grandmother Fuchs’ daughter Ottilie describes the land on the Colorado River as the family found it in 1853, approximately 30 years before the town of Marble Falls was founded.
	“The springs never ran dry and the lack of grass for grazing sheep and cattle was unknown.  On the contrary, one had a struggle to prevent the great carpet of flowers from rolling down the surrounding hills to completely smother the vegetables.  My bothers built boats to use for fishing in the river, teeming with trout, so-called catfish and dozens of other creatures inhabiting the watery depths.  On Sundays it was a favorite pastime to go boating on the river lake.  It was normally very calm, but in the spring it was occasionally transformed into a foaming icy sea by the water rushing down from the upper Colorado.  Mighty oaks growing along the banks were uprooted and carried along by the raging red flood, a grand display of the water’s force.  How interesting this all was for us.  The pecan trees, the clear creeks, the many beautiful springs.
	“Besides fishing, the hunting possibilities along the Colorado River were without equal.  There were great numbers of deer and turkeys.  During the winter, the river was alive with wild geese and ducks so that we could make feather beds to sleep under in the winter time.”
	According to the pioneer settler mountain lions and bear were also abundant.  At this time Burnet was the trade center.  Although the family was almost self-sufficient, flour was hard to obtain during the Civil War years, and it took 14 days to get it from Houston by wagon.
	Hermann Fuchs, Adolph’s youngest son, built the present structure now owned by the Krumm family of Marble Falls.  Construction began in 1877 and was completed two years later.  Two feet of stone covered with the original plaster made at a lime kiln just below the home has preserved the home’s rich interior.  Hand carved doors of cypress are worn smooth by the hands of its inhabitants.  Its hardwood floors are as firm as its walls.  Fireplaces on each of the three floors kept the Fuchs and Krumm family warm when bitterly cold northers blew across the countryside.
	Held solidly with hand forged nails, massive cedar beams almost a foot square reinforce each of the floors.  Window sills of cypress two feet wide are set into the walls and provide window seats which were and no doubt will continue to be occupied by children on a rainy day or a dreamer enjoying the panoramic view of the rich Colorado River Valley.
	Karl and Antonie (Toni) Krumm, with their young son Henry, moved from New York in 1900 and settled at the Fuchs ranch on a share holder basis.  They soon welcomed a daughter, Ann. In 1921 he purchased the land from Hermann Fuchs’ son Albano and began clearing a portion of the land for planting.
	Tiger Mill, as it was known at that time, was so named because of the mill owned by Hermann Fuchs’ brother, Conrad.  It was located on Tiger Creek where settlers brought wheat and cotton to the grist mill and lumber to the saw mill.  The location also served as a post office where mail was brought by the Pony Express and distributed.  Henry Krumm, who now maintains the ranch, has kept the cabinet in which the lettered mail boxes were located.  As a young boy, he attended school on the ranch with his sister Ann and the Fuchs children.  Due to the distance and hardship of transportation, teachers were employed with their room and board alternating each three months between Mrs. Fuchs and Mrs. Krumm.  Krumm recalls his teachers, Miss Marie Hester, Emily Lange of Austin, and Miss Winnie Hays who is now Mrs. George Brazielle.  
	Karl Krumm was a man who knew well and appreciated the land’s natural resources.  The hand-built retaining walls of stone still terrace the sloping hillside holding the soil.  His love for the land has been instilled in his son Henry.  Following her husband’s death 20 years ago, Mrs. Krumm remained at the ranch until 1962 when she moved to Marble Falls.  Eight years with virtually no inhabitants would normally leave a structure in a state of ruin, but not the Krumm house.  Under the watchful eye of Henry, who with his wife Margaret will soon occupy it once again, the old house is in perfect repair and the fat Herefords attest to his careful maintenance of the pastureland.  Undergrowth remains cleared from beneath stately oak and pecan trees which are the feeding grounds of deer and turkey. The three springs, one of which feeds Tiger Creek, have flowed constantly for as long as Henry Krumm can remember.  
	German immigrants are credited with much of the early settlement and growth of Texas.  Their contribution continues through their sturdy and land-loving descendants.

The Highlander				
Marble Falls, Texas 				
August 19, 1971

Disaster At Dead Man’s Hole

To the Editor:
	I read with more than passing interest the account by Tad Moses of the grisly deeds associated with Dead Man’s Hole.  You see, my great-grandfather was one of its victims, the one identified in your story as “a man (who) was murdered while cutting cedar posts on Flat Rock Creek just out of Marble Falls.”
	I was reminded that years ago, while studying journalism at The University of Texas, I had written a feature story on this event, using information which my paternal grandfather, Herman Richter, had given me.  This article, which was published in Marvin Hunter’s “Frontier Times” in March, 1941, I am enclosing, and I would be pleased for you to reprint it as a follow-up to Mr. Moses’ story, if you feel your readers might be interested.
	Adolph Hoppe, the victim in my article, was known as a bold and fearless pioneer, as attested by the fact that he openly defied the bushwhackers who were after him.  There is a bit of family lore which tells of the time that he and a companion, while traveling by horseback across the land, bedded down for the night under the stars.  Hoppe awoke to find a heavy object on his stomach and was able to discern that it was a rattlesnake which had crawled there for warmth.  Instead of panicking, he made noises until his companion was awakened.  Then he instructed him to build up the camp fire until the heat made the rattler so uncomfortable that he left his resting place on his own initiative.
	I’ve always thought it was too bad that such a man should ultimately fall victim to other rattlesnakes –  the human and more lethal variety.
Sincerely, 
Walter H. Richter
804 Littlefield Building 
Austin, Texas 78701

WALTER RICHTER

	“Dead Man’s Hole” is the rather sinister sounding name of an unusual cavity in a cow pasture some four miles south of Marble Falls in Burnet County.  Nor is the name ill-chosen.
	Historically, the hole is steeped in blood stains and beclouded with many tragic tales of murder and mystery.  For hidden by dense cedar brakes and opening downward with startling abruptness, the foreboding cavity was a convenient spot for outlaws and other criminals to dispose of bodies of their victims.
	But this article shall concern only one person whose story makes an interesting, bloody addition to the chronicle of “Dead Man’s Hole.”  That person was my great grandfather, Adolph Hoppe.
	This story is set just preceding the outbreak of the Civil War when much controversy was raging between the Secessionist and Union factions.  When Texas voted for secession, there was an outbreak of violence as individuals known as “bushwhackers,” assuming the cloak of devotion to the Confederate cause, engaged in a campaign of terror and intimidation of those they disliked or regarded as the enemy.
	At that time, Adolph Hoppe, his wife, a small daughter, and a ten-year-old son (my maternal grandfather) were living about six miles below the present site of Marble Falls on the Colorado River.
	One morning Hoppe, accompanied by a friend, a Mr. Flour, who was visiting in his home, left in his wagon to get a load of cedar posts for the construction of a sheep stable from the cedar brakes south of Flat Rock Creek, which runs within a mile or so of “Dead Man’s Hole.”  Little did he anticipate the tragic happenings of the day as he drove off or realize that he had looked on his little family for the last time.
	Having laboriously secured the required number of posts, the two had just started on their way home when they were halted by a Ranger captain and a group of men.  Apparently these men had first gone to the Hoppe home and had been directed to this spot by Mrs. Hoppe.  While this cannot be substantiated, it is a reasonable deduction for otherwise the two men could hardly have been located in the densely wooded wilderness.
	The proceedings, recounted later by the Ranger, were somewhat as follows:
	“Gentlemen,” said the Ranger, “I have been requested by these men to arrest you for attending secret Union meetings, so I shall have to trouble you to come with us.”
	“As far as I am concerned,” answered Hoppe, “your accusation is wrong.  Besides, I have a wife and children waiting for me at home.” But after some discussion he and Flour agreed to allow themselves to be tried then and there.
	After a short examination enough evidence was produced to convince the Ranger that Flour was guilty of the charge.  Then turning to Hoppe he asked, “You sir, do you plead guilty of the charge that you have been attending secret Union meetings?”
	“Not guilty,” said Hoppe.  “I voted for secession and I defy you to prove otherwise.”
	“Oh, yes,” sneered one of his accusers, “then what are you doing in the company of this skunk?”
	“Understand,” answered Hoppe, “I do not choose my friends by their political beliefs.”
	There followed some harsh words between Hoppe and various members of the group, and matters were not helped when the Ranger declared the evidence insufficient to hold Hoppe further.  After sending the angered accusers off with Flour as their prisoner, the Ranger called Hoppe aside and said, “To my notion these men are bushwhackers and are in a hostile mood.  I feel it my duty to accompany you safely home.”
	But Hoppe would have none of it, saying that he felt perfectly able to take care of himself.  (It later developed that Flour, whom the Secessionists were to take to San Antonio, never arrived there and was never heard of again.)
	Shortly after Hoppe had taken his departure a shot rang out in the direction he had taken, the Ranger captain reported.  Sensing foul play, he dashed in that direction but the density of the cedar brake and the growing dusk soon made his search quite futile.
	Hoppe did not come home that night but his team of horses did, still wearing part of their harness which had been cut to disengage the team from the wagon.  A group of his friends living in the area, who called themselves the Home Guard Company, called a meeting and the next day a few men volunteered to investigate the ominous developments.
	These men finally discovered the wagon load of cedar.  Knowing of “Dead Man’s Hole” and its evil reputation, the men went there, expecting the worst.  Sure enough, on arriving there they saw a small strip of leather on a ledge some fifteen or twenty feet below the opening, which is almost a perfect circle about ten feet in diameter and extending virtually straight down for some 135 feet.  One man was lowered on a rope to this ledge and procured the leather which was identified as part of Hoppe’s harness.
	There was no doubt in their minds that Adolph Hoppe’s bruised body was resting at the bottom of the pit.  Nevertheless, the men left the hole without attempting to recover the body and kept their mouths shut.  They apparently decided it was unwise for their minority group to raise any objection to the strong desperate faction which they suspected as guilty of the misdeed.
	“Why did you all kill Hoppe?” one of the men once made bold to ask the leader of the suspected renegades many years later.  “Because He was in bad company,” the outlaw answered, thus admitting his guilt.
	In 1866, after the war, a party of men, including my paternal grandfather, Herman Richter, who was then sixteen years of age, set out to explore “Dead Man’s Hole.” First, a lantern was lowered into the hole in order that the quality of the air might be determined.  The flame emerged burning, so, satisfied that all was well, one of the company was lowered into the hole with a long stout rope.
	When the explorer emerged from the hole, he brought with him a pair of shoes which was clearly identified as having belonged to Adolph Hoppe.  He also brought up additional pieces of Hoppe’s harness.  Grandfather Richter said he stated there were “thousands of bones” at the bottom, both human and otherwise.
	In later years, my grandfather asserted, the sheriff of Burnet county and a group of men explored this natural grave for murder victims.  Several large sacks of bones were brought up, enough, according to a report by the sheriff, for sixteen skeletons.

	Walter Richter is a native of Burnet County, born on the family ranch of a 100 years or so in the Double Horn community outside Marble Falls.  He has an impressive career in public service, having been a state senator and head of both the Texas and the federal regional Offices of Economic Opportunity.
	He still lives in Austin and is involved in work related to control of drug abuse under the newly established Texas Department of Community Affairs.

++++++

DEAD MAN’S HOLE. Dead Man’s Hole, in the W. L. Burnam pasture south of Marble Falls in southern Burnet County, is a deep, well-like hole probably caused by gas pressure. It was discovered in 1821 by entomologist Ferdinand Lueders while he was in the area to study night-flying insects. The cave achieved notoriety during the Civil War as a dumping place for the bodies of Union sympathizers. The remains of several bodies were recovered from the cave in the late 1860s, but the presence of gas prevented extensive exploration. The gas evidently dissipated over time, for in 1951 a group of spelunkers from the University of Texas successfully descended the hole. They reported that Dead Man’s Hole was seven feet in diameter at the surface and about 160 feet deep; at its base, the hole split into two “arms,” one extending straight back for about fifteen feet, and the other sloping downward at a 45̊ angle for about thirty feet. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Houston Chronicle, September 9, 1951. Vertical Files, Barker Texas History Center, University of Texas at Austin (Marble Falls)

[Source:  Handbook of Texas Online]
The Highlander
Marble Falls, Texas							
December 2, 1971

Horseshoe Bay Would Be Amazing To Old Adolph Fuchs, Pioneer
Many Changes Made Near His Old Home
Greg Olds

Mention the Horseshoe Bay area to local history buffs and you will strike a responsive chord.  The area is the one that was the cradle of settlement in what has become southern Burnet and Llano counties, a land that was colonized mostly by Germans.
The story of the Horseshoe Bay area history begins with the story of Ferdinand Leuders.  Leuders came to this area in the 1820s, doing work as a naturalist for the Smithsonian Institution.
Traveling towards San Antonio he stopped off one evening in southern Burnet County at the place of the Benson family on Flatrock Creek, near the intersection of today’s Highways 71 and 281.  Leuders subsisted on food he found in the Benson garden.
He would make candles, to use for attracting insects after night.  Drawn by the light, the bugs would come near and would be captured by Leuders for study.
He wrote of his experience in this area, recounting that while working at night at his encampment he could hear bugs hitting the water in what he assumed was a well.  In time, he found that the “well” was in fact the deep cavity in the earth that has come to be known as Dead Man’s Hole, a hole into which some murdered persons’ bodies have on occasion been dumped in earlier days.
Mrs. W. W. Fuller, a Marble Falls woman who is a student of local history, says that “Leuders was the first one whom I read about that discovered Dead Man’s Hole. “
Leuders returned in time to his native Germany and wrote a book about his travels in this including his tour of Texas.  Mrs. Fuller says that Dr. Walter Prescott Webb, the great Texas historian, had the book, which had been published in Germany, translated into English.  Mrs. Fuller believes the translation is probably available at the University of Texas library at Austin.
After writing his book, Leuders returned in the 1830s to Texas and in the course of events was killed at the Battle of the Alamo.  The Republic of Texas gave his heirs a grant of land, in gratitude for his service during the war with Mexico.  (There is, by the way, a Leuders, Texas, in Jones County, near Anson, named for this Alamo victim.)
Leuders’ brother in Germany gave the grant to his pastor, Adolph Fuchs (pronounced “fox” hereabouts), a name that is written large in the history of this part of Texas.
Eight years after receiving the grant, Fuchs arrived at the old Texas port of Indianola, located on the Gulf Coast between Corpus Christi and Houston, near Port Lavaca.
He later moved on to Cat Spring, near Bellville in Austin County, then, in the 1850s, Fuchs arrived in the area of what has become the Coca Cola Ranch and, subsequently, Horseshoe Bay.  He settled on Castle Mountain.
Among his belongings was a piano, perhaps the first in this part of Texas.
His place became a mail stop on the route between Fredericksburg and Burnet.  It was known as Tiger Mill.  A road had been built linking those two towns when Fort Martin Scott and Fort Crown were established as part of a string of forts along Texas’ western frontier.  
The lineage of the venerable Adolph Fuchs reads like a Who’s Who of this part of Texas. Such names as Matern, Varnhagan, Nunnally, Giesecke, Goeth, Wennmohs, Richter and others come to be related to his family.
And courthouse records show that members of the Fuchs family conveyed land on or near the Coke Ranch to such other families as Wennmohs, Carpenter, Stolley, Goeth, Murphy and Wilke and others.
Mrs. Fuller, whose own antecedents go back to the settlers of Double Horn, among them the Franklins and the Dennisons, recalls that it became a custom in the 1880s for fox races (or, perhaps more accurately, dog races) to be held at the place of B. M. Gibson, in the same area as Horseshoe Bay and the Fuchs settlement.
A fox would be set loose and several dogs let go after it.  There would be betting on which dog would get to the fox first.

THE HIGHLANDER			
Marble Falls, Texas				
February 10, 1972

Hill Country History . . .

Adolf Fuchs – Pastor, Poet And Pioneer

One purpose of The Highlander’s series on Hill Country history is to correct erroneous accounts of the days gone by.  It is for this reason, among others, that we are delighted to present this week this account of the region’s remarkable Adolf Fuchs family.
The article is written by a Fuchs descendant, Mrs. Esther Richter Weaver, now of Fredericksburg.
Mrs. Weaver’s carefully and well-written article corrects some errors contained in my account of the Fuchs family, as published in The Highlander of December 2, 1971. Those errors were partly the result of some misinformation I had gathered.
For example, the house discussed in the December 2 article was not that of Adolf Fuchs but of his oldest son, Conrad.
Also, the name Lueders was misspelled as Leuders.  (That’s the name of the man whose Texas land grant was conveyed to Fuchs.)  The name is shown in several ways on various documents but Mrs. Weaver assures us that Lueders is the correct spelling.  Also, I spelled Adolf Fuchs’ first name incorrectly, as “Adolph.”
Further, I had written, “Eight years after receiving the grant, Fuchs arrived at the old Texas port of Indianola.”  Mrs. Weaver advises that this is wrong in two respects.  First, Fuchs came to Texas very shortly after he received the land grant from the Lueders heirs; but it was eight years after he got to Texas before he was able to take possession of his land.  And secondly, the Fuchs family landed at Galveston, not at Indianola, and then took a small steamer up Buffalo Bayou to Houston.
Mrs. Weaver found an earlier Highlander article on the Fuchs family a more reliable piece of work. That was the one written by the former Janice Clayton a couple of years ago.  That article also appeared in the December 2, 1971 Highlander, as a reprint.
Mrs. Weaver credits several other people for assistance in providing information important to her article.  She offers thanks to Tad Moses, Mrs. Warren Fuller, Henry Krumm, Ferdinand Tatsch, Mrs. Rubin Houy, Herman Reiner, Mrs. Richard Schnelle and Mr. and Mrs. Ernest Guenther.  “I am also greatly indebted to the two books which I have mentioned in the story,” Mrs. Weaver writes.
I am pleased to commend Mrs. Weaver’s article to you.  It is excellent, the work of an able writer who is dealing with a subject of considerable interest in our region. —  GREG OLDS.

	

1849 PASTOR ADOLF FUCHS
Typical of the pioneering drive of Texas Germans for publicly-supported education was the petition of Pastor Adolf Fuchs to the Legislature for financial aid to the Cat Spring school, in 1849. This was the forerunner of a petition by the Texas Germans for general State support of public schools, the first promotion of this now-accepted practice in Texas. Pastor Fuchs left the ministry and tried farming, then became interested in education. He taught music at Baylor Female College, Independence, before moving to Cypress Mill, in the Hill Country, where he died.

Adolf Fuchs – Pastor, Poet And Pioneer

Esther Richter Weaver

“Now the Lord said to Abraham, go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.  And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you .  .  . “
This is the text from the Old Testament, first and second verses of the 12th chapter of Genesis, which Pastor Adolf Fuchs used in his farewell sermon to his congregation in Kölzow, Mecklenburg, Germany, in 1845.  In this sermon he explained the reasons for his leaving them in order to go to Texas..  He had both spiritual and material reasons.
Overpopulation in Germany was his material reason; because of overpopulation, economic opportunities had decreased, and poverty and immorality had become more prevalent.  He had seven children growing to young manhood and womanhood; what would they do?” Yes, you beloved Christians, in the future I would rather earn my bread by the sweat of my brow than through God’s will to be dependent here on the surplus of the wealthy and the hard-earned money of the poor.”
The lack of religious freedom was his spiritual reason.  ‘The freedom of the church had become lost through regimentation and restrictions based on the will of powerful priests or kings.  He ‘said in his sermon, “Although I have never presented anything to you as being my own opinion unless it truly was; yes, even though I have ever lied to you, there were thousands and thousands of times when I had to remain silent concerning my inner convictions — for reasons of prudence, for your sake as well as my own.  That is what I could no longer bear!”
He continued, “And do you hope, I believe you will say that God will bless you there with these (freedom of belief, conscience, and worship of God), the most precious of assets, as well as with material things? that like Abraham you even hope that God will make you into a great nation, not only of large numbers, but a nation of highly spiritual, intellectual, religious, and righteous people? Yes, I truly hope this.  .  .  I could not honestly leave my fatherland.
“You see, I also hope that there where I will be respected only as a person than for my position and dress; and that as God dwells in the hearts of all human beings and not only in temples built by human hands, I hope, I say, that there where the actual religious freedom exists which we do not know here, in the course of the years a community will develop which is worthy of comparison with the beautiful original concept of a Christian community.  That is my hope!” 
Surely this great-great-grandfather mine was a man far ahead of his time in his thinking.  Were he alive today and in the pulpit, his liberal philosophy and religion might well attract a great following.
Adolf Fuchs (the German name rhymes with “books”; the English translation is Fox), born in 1805 as son of a church superintendent, became a well educated young man, studying theology and philosophy at the universities of Jena, Halle and Göttingen.  He studied the violin and cultivated his fine natural gift for singing.  He also learned five languages other than German: Latin, Greek, French, Hebrew and English.

An Old Dream
The dream of emigrating to America was a long time in the making; it was no will-o’-the-wisp inspiration.  It is likely that while pursuing his university studies, he was already stirred by the idealism of the young America.  He was not quite 24 years old when he married Luise Rümker.  Soon after, he became assistant rector in Waren, Mecklenburg.  Four children were born during their six years in Waren:  Luise (Lulu), Ulrika (Ulla), Conrad and Adolf, the latter dying very young.  During this six-year period, he and his hunting companion, young Doctor Kortuem, read the novels of James Fenimore Cooper together; from then on they were to each other Hawkeye Fuchs and Uncas Kortuem..  This could well have been the beginning of the dream.
Ten more years passed (1835-1845) while he was pastor at Kölzow, Mecklenburg, before  the dream became a reality.  Four more children were born:  Ottilie, William, Adolfine (Ino), and Hermann.  He wrote “Robert”, an ecclesiastical novel in two volumes, which was published in 1842.  The most significant portions of the book, according to great-granddaughter Irma Goeth Guenther, are those in which Robert, in form of a diary, philosophizes on what he expects to find in North America in regard to the Christian religion and cultural and economic opportunities.
In 1844 when Mayor Lueders in Marlow learned that his friend Pastor Fuchs was going to Texas, he gave Fuchs the papers to a league of land in Texas which the mayor had inherited from his brother.  This brother had received the league of land for his services during the War of Independence against Mexico.  The forty-year-old Pastor Fuchs accepted the papers, but he was in Texas eight years before he gained possession of the land with the aid of the land surveyor De Cordova.
He, his wife and seven children left Bremen November 13, 1845; spent more than seven weeks on a rough sea in a gruesome old ship with horrible food and water; and landed at Galveston January 10, 1846.  They boarded a small steamer and rode up Buffalo Bayou to Houston.  At Houston they loaded their belongings into a wagon drawn by five pairs of oxen and drove as far as Cat Spring, Austin County.  There Pastor Fuchs bought a small farm.  His youngest son, Benjamin (Bennie), was born in Cat Spring.
Discouraging days lay ahead for the pastor.  Handling the plow was clumsy and difficult for him.  Eventually, realizing that he needed additional income, he began to teach music at the homes of rich plantation owners on the Brazos; later at Baylor Female College in Independence.
The Texans of those times recognized him as a man of culture, and his influence on early Texas education was noted at the 1968 HemisFair.  In 1840 he petitioned the Texas Legislature for financial aid to the Cat Spring school, as “English schools are undeniably the best way to Americanize the German population of Texas and to make good citizens of them.”
By 1853 the Lueders land grants were settled.  One-third of the land went to the surveyor; two tracts of 600 acres each were sold by Fuchs at a very low price; Fuchs retained one tract of 1,000 acres on the Clear Fork of the Brazos River, where the town of Lueders is located in Jones County, north of the present city of Abilene, and one section of 602 acres along the south bank of the Colorado River.  He moved his family (all except Lulu, who had died in Austin County, and Ulla, who had married Karl Andreas Matern in Cat Spring) to the Colorado River acreage in Burnet County in 1853.  This land later belonged to his grandson Albano Fuchs, son of Hermann, who in turn sold it to Armin Matern, a great-grandson of the pastor. This land, or the greater part of it, is now owned by the Cottonwood Shores Development.

The Pioneers

Now back to the pioneers.  The family loved their new home, the wild green river valley with the scenic hills in the background. The little and the big Castle Mountain were so named by the pastor.  Mrs. Marie Ebeling Houy, a great-granddaughter of the patriarch, tells that her grandmother, Mrs. Ulla Fuchs Matern Varnhagen, spoke of the abundance of fish, game, wild berries, plums, agarita, grapes, blackhaws and bee trees they found there.  She also told that her brothers, the Fuchs boys, were great hunters; one of them killed a bobcat which they called a tiger.  Perhaps Tiger Creek which runs through this land was so named because this “tiger” was killed on its banks.
Later the community came to be known as Tiger Mill because the oldest son, who had bought 419 acres southwest of the Lueders tract, operated a steam mill at the head of Tiger Creek.  A beautiful spring gushes forth at this spot today.  In recent years Conrad’s place has been known as the Hedges place, and has now been purchased by Norman Hurd of the Horseshoe Bay Development Company.

A Visit

It was recently my privilege to visit for the first time the historic old rock house built by Conrad.  The outer walls, floors and three chimneys are still standing; some reinforcement of the walls has been done since those olden days.
The picture of this home as it is today appeared in the special Horseshoe Bay section of The Highlander but was erroneously identified as the Adolf Fuchs home.  The side of the house which faces south and has an open basement appears today to be the back of the house.  Originally, it was not so intended; that was the front of the house.  A long, high porch was to be built on this side, just as the one on the south side of his brother Hermann’s home (Krumm house); several huge cedar logs were put into place to hold the floor of the porch, but the task was never completed.
Mrs. Ino Varnhagen Tatsch of Harper, also a great-granddaughter of the pastor, recently told me about visiting in this home when she was a child.  She and other children were warned to be careful of that open-ended hall which was intended to connect with the front porch-not-yet-built on the south.
One impressionable feature of the house is the stairway of stones built on the east side leading to the kitchen door, each level a perfectly executed half circle.  This house is built on the southern slope of a hill, and there is a beautiful view from the kitchen window of Marble Falls in the distance.  The hill slopes to the lovely valley of Tiger Creek, where we found log-fence corrals, old oak trees, the sparkling spring and stream, a huge, round millstone, and a green meadow with a few large pecan trees.
According to the article, “44 Post Offices Have Served Burnet County,” in The Highlander, June 17, 1971, a post office was opened at Tiger Mill September 2, 1872, with Conrad L. Fox as postmaster.  Later the post office was moved to the Hermann Fuchs home, which is now the Krumm home.  Mr. Henry Krumm still has in his possession the cabinet containing the old post office boxes.  He told that Miss Frieda Fuchs, daughter of Hermann, was postmistress for a time.  The Tiger Mill post office was in operation 15 years before Marble Falls was founded in 1887.  It closed November 26, 1901.

Log Cabin

The home of Adolf and Luise Fuchs must have been a log cabin.  Their daughter Ottilie in her book Was Grossmutter Erzählt, 1915, (translated by her granddaughter Irma Goeth Guenther as Memoirs of a Texas Pioneer Grandmother) writes that her brothers worked very hard to fix up the new home.  She adds, “Fortunately, my brothers were more practically inclined than their learned father, so that after a time we were somewhat better situated.  Mother also had a practical side . . . after a few years we obtained a piano, and music lessons were resumed for the younger children.”  This home was situated, Mrs. Ino Tatsch told me, east of the family cemetery —  somewhere between the cemetery and the Crownover fence.  The cemetery is located on Oak Lane in the Cottonwood Shores development.
Ottilie relates in her book that the family attended a big Fourth of July celebration at the falls of the Colorado (site of Marble Falls) in 1855, sponsored by the little town of Burnet. Adam R. Johnson, later blinded in the Civil War and ranked as brigadier general, was at that time a member of the younger set.  “Together with our neighbors we floated down the river on a raft. . . the arrival of our ferry was greeted with loud cheering by the other guests.  Above the falls the river forms a two-mile-long lake with a fording point at the upper end, practically the only one on the river, except during low water when one can cross at many points.
“The celebration was very gay . . . Eloquent speeches were held, and young and old cavorted around on the banks of the beautiful river, or admired the falls gushing over the huge boulders.  There was singing and dancing. . .” 
Ottilie writes that her father developed the trade of tuning pianos.  “When money was scarce at home, . . . he took off on a tuning trip to replenish the empty pocket book. He charged only a small fee though. . . Therefore he was always a welcome guest at any home where he cared to stop.  When Father the craftsman had finished tuning a piano, then ‘Mr. Fox’ the artist sat down at the piano, often singing the rousing Texas songs with verses by Hoffmann von Fallersleben which Father and Robert Kleberg had so faithfully translated into English.  The appreciation of his music meant a great deal more to him than any money he earned.”

Der Stern

Before Pastor Fuchs left Germany, his famous poet-friend, Hoffmann von Fallersleben, author of the lyrics of the German national anthem, wrote the song, “Der Stern von Texas” (The Star of Texas) and dedicated it to  Fuchs as a  farewell.  The poet wrote, collected, land privately published lyrics for 31 songs dealing with Texas and the German immigration to Texas.  This small book, “Texanische Lieder” (Texas Songs), he sent to his Texas friends, and Adolf Fuchs translated and helped to translate these songs into English.  Also, Fuchs wrote the music for some of the lyrics, such as “The Battle Song at San Jacinto”, “The German Backwoodsman”, and “Love Song of an Emigrant”.  A photocopy of “Texanische Lieder” is located in the Eugene C. Barker Texas History Center of the University of Texas Library, Austin.
Pastor Fuchs composed music not only for the lyrics of Fallersleben but also for those of other German poets, such as Goethe, Uhland, Baltzer, Herwegh and Wieland.  He also composed many poems of his own and the music for them.  Lota Spell in her book, Music in Texas, 1936, says “. . . a manuscript volume preserved by the family is evidence of his creative bent.”   Photocopies of this volume are now on file in the archives and library of UT’s Barker History Center and also in the Institute of Texan Cultures at San Antonio.  From 1835 to 1880, he wrote the music for 115 compositions.
His children and grandchildren loved to sing these songs.  Musical talent was common among them.  In fact, one of them, grandson Oscar Fox (son of Bennie) became a well-known composer of music and has been honored by a marker on Highway 281 just south of Marble Falls, overlooking his “hills of home.”
Probably the most popular of the Adolf Fuchs songs  was “Wenn der Sänger Ziehet durch den Wilden Wald” (When The Singer Travels through the Wild Forest).  This song was arranged for chorus by his grandson Oscar Fox and performed on May 4, 1936, by the Beethoven Männerchor (Men’s Chorus) at the San Antonio Municipal Auditorium as a portion of the National Music Week program.  In this same concert Oscar Fox was also featured as the accompanist to some of the singers, and Irma Goeth, great-granddaughter of Pastor Fuchs, played some violin solos.

Singers Safe

At this moment, I can recall two other great-granddaughters who were prominent in the musical world.  One was Mrs. Carl (Virginia Goebel) Marrs, who conducted an excellent orchestra in Marble Falls; the other, Lulu Giesecke, made a name for herself as a violinist in Chicago.
One of the daughters of Pastor Fuchs, Ino (the German “i” is pronounced like the English long “e”), was unharmed by marauding Indians as she rode horseback early one morning, as the moon was still shining, toward the little Castle Mountain to visit her sisters-in-law, Mrs. Conrad Fuchs and Mrs. William Fuchs, who lived along Tiger Creek.  She was unharmed because she sang loudly and fully in her lovely voice; Indians are said to believe that singers are protected by the Great Spirit.  Ino said that just there between the mountains where later the tracks of the Indianhorses had been found to blot those of Ino’s horse, she had enjoyed the echo of her songs.
My great-grandmother Luise Romberg Fuchs (Mrs. William Fuchs) in her book, Erinnerungen, 1927, (translated as Reminiscences by Helen and Gertrude Franke), tells about the home life of the parents-in-law:  “We had fine times on Sundays and holidays when we all assembled at the grandparents’ home, for they almost always had plenty of fish, and venison roast, and Grandmother always had something good in addition to that; the best was the coffee for afternoon lunch, even if it was a substitute (roasted potatoes, grape seeds or black persimmon seeds), and the music that followed it and the stimulating conversation . . . Grandfather once said with enthusiasm:  ‘We could travel and give concerts!’ . . . The house of my parents-in-law was a very hospitable one, and many people went in gladly . . . The children also respected their parents very much.”
Seemingly, other people respected him too, even the bitter enemies of the Union during the Civil War, for daughter Ottilie in her book says, “Even during the worst turmoil of the Civil War, when the life of every Unionist was in danger (as were the lives of his sons), Father calmly conducted himself as usual, and he was not molested, although he made little secret of his loyalty to the Union.”

Weddings
				
Pastor Fuchs did not pursue the ministry publicly in Texas, but he did perform the marriage rites for his children, possibly for others, too.
Mention has already been made of the marriage of daughter Ulla to Karl Matern, a forester and skilled craftsman from Bavaria.  They moved from the Cat Spring area to be near the Fuchs family and built a log cabin nearby.  Their children were Ivo, Adolf, Helene, Marie, Anna, Luise (Lulu), Hermann and Ulrika (Ullie).  They married into the Kellersberger, Skinner, Goebel, Grote, Ebeling, Williams, and Giesecke families.
Son Conrad, whose home I have already described, was married to Anna Perlitz.  Two of their children died of diphtheria and are buried in the family cemetery already mentioned.  Growing to adulthood were four sons, Frederick, Adolf, Werner and Bennie, and two daughters, Lina and Ino.  They married into the Knippa, Miller and Pridgen families.
Once, when William (brother of Conrad), was in Austin, he met Conrad’s son Adolf, who tuned pianos there, and suggested to him that he start a quarry at Lueders, as he had the  mechanical knowledge.  This land still belonged to the estate of Pastor Fuchs.  Conrad’s son Adolf (a bachelor) agreed to do this, and, with the machinery bought by his uncle William, made a success of the venture.  Several of William’s sons worked at the quarry, too.  Conrad Fuchs, his son Adolf, and his grandson Werner (child of Bennie and Effie Pridgen Fuchs) are also buried in the family cemetery.
Daughter Ottilie married Carl Goeth.  They eventually settled in the Cypress Mill community of Blanco County, where he became a sheep breeder and was also a state legislator in 1887-88, representing Blanco, Comal and Gillespie Counties.  Children of this couple were Adolf, Luise, Ottilie, Conrad, Edward, Richard and Max.  They married into the Tips, Wenmohs, Groos, Schroeter, Dittmar and von Rosenberg families.

Tiger Creek

Son William (Willie) married Luise Romberg in 1861.  Their first home was also on Tiger Creek, about a quarter of a mile below Conrad’s home and about a mile from Hermann’s home. She describes it as a “small, pretty, but very wild place, almost surrounded by rocks . . . it was like an oasis in a rock desert.  Where our home was to stand, an impenetrable thicket grew.  As it was cleared away, a large, old live oak tree appeared, the thick trunk making a bend before it stretched upward.  In the crook, Indians had cut steps, to make it easier to climb the tree.  The place had apparently been an Indian camp; a little to the front stood several large poplars, under which there was still visible evidence that it had once been the Indians’ sleeping place.  The wonderful trees had been partially stripped of bark, and the thick bark had been placed in piles and used as beds.  We also found drinking-vessels made of horn.
“Although the place did not lie low, my husband had to dig only a few feet under these poplars to get nice drinking water.  On only one side were there a few acres of very rich farm . . . land.  As Willie raised cattle, this small plot was sufficient.  We grew large crops of potatoes . . . also fine rye . . . It grew almost as tall as my head.  It was taken to the Mormon Mill on Hamilton Creek, and very nice flour was made from it.  At that time, many Mormons still lived there.  In front of our house, a splendid stream of water went splashing over the rocks . . . Willie had bought a log-house from his brother-in-law Matern, who wanted to move to Pecan Creek (the present Fritz Wenmohs place).  So we did not receive our dwelling so very soon. First, we built a backroom, in front of which the log-house was to be built.  We lived for a while in our romantic Indian home, till the log-house was vacant and had been torn down and again built up with the addition of a chimney.”
At this home, three children were born:  Dora, Johanna (my grandmother-to-be), and Theodor.  Eleven more children were born at Cypress Mill in Blanco County, where Willie operated the mill begun by his brother-in-law Matern.  Those growing to adulthood were William, Ida, Julius, Luise, Bernhardina, Paula, Reinhold, Adolf, and Johannes (John).  These young men and women married into the families of Reiner, Hoppe, Giger, Goeth, Goebel, Ebeling, Henslee, Willerson and Wenmohs.

Varnhagens

Daughter Ino married Adolf Varnhagen, also a sheep breeder.  He owned the land south of that owned by his brothers-in-law Conrad and Hermann.  Ino died while giving birth to her only child, Ulrich.  Her sister, Ulla Matern, cared for the baby.  Ulla was now widowed since her husband, working hard at his mill on Cypress Creek, had become sick and suddenly died.  Three years after Ino’s death, she married Mr. Varnhagen.  The young man Ulrich married Hedwig Pressler.
Son Bennie, a cattle raiser and piano tuner, married Emma Kellersberger, a music teacher.  They had three children:  Arnold (who died as a child), Cora and Oscar (the composer mentioned above). Emma died five months after Oscar was born.  Bennie later married Anna Mackensen, and became the father of  two more children, Emma and Ernst.  Bennie’s children married into the Struve, Tuttle and Beelitz families.
Bennie’s life ended tragically while he was visiting the grave of his first wife in the family cemetery.  He is buried next to her, and his daughters Cora and Emma and his son Arnold lie near them.

Rough Ride

Son Hermann married Caroline Romberg, sister of the Luise who had married his brother Willie.  With the money they earned making saddles, they bought the land south of Father Adolf’s place, in which is located the ever-flowing Moonlight Spring, also on Tiger Creek.  Hermann called their three-story rock home, built 1877-79, Colorado Valley View Home.  A later picture of the Hermann Fuchs home shows some changes [from the original design].  The view is northwestward.  The south side of the home has become the front of the house and the north side, which once was a porch, has been enclosed. Hermann introduced Angora goats from Turkey into this country; wrote articles for FARM and RANCH magazine; advertised his goats for sale; and as a result, shipped goats all over the United States.  Hermann and Lina had two foster children, Walter and Marietta, and three of their own:  Frieda, Albano, and Johanna.  These married into the Fuhrmann, Maynard, Fuchs, and Schnelle families.
Recently, Herman Reiner of Cypress Mill, great-grandson of Pastor Fuchs, told how thrilled he was when he shot his first deer as a 16-year-old boy (about 1907) in that country.  Later, when he stayed with the Albano Fuchs family, he and Albano and Mr. Karl Krumm would meet at the Moonlight Spring (Mondschein Quelle) to go on their hunting excursions.  “Some of the happiest days of my life were spent there,” he told me.
Mrs. Marie Houy also told fly about traveling from her home as a child to visit the Varnhagens.  They left their home on the Double Horn Creek, drove through the woods on a country road past the Walter Giesecke place (now the home of the L. E. Gregg family), and then on to the Varnhagen place at the wonderful Cordova Spring ( where the Schieffer family later lived).  From there they went to see the Hermann Fuchs family, driving right by the old Conrad Fuchs rock house.  “And was it a rough, rocky road there!  Cedar brush.  It was wild-looking.  I’ll never forget the rough ride.”
Pastor and Mrs. Adolf Fuchs spent their last months in the home of their daughter and son-in-law, Mr. and Mrs. Carl Goeth.  He died in December1885, and she in March 1886.  His last words were:  “Behold the path with roses.” The pioneer couple are buried in the family cemetery.  Also buried in this cemetery other than those already mentioned are Adolf and Ino Varnhagen, Ulrich and Hedwig Varnhagen and their son Frank, Hermann and Caroline Fuchs and daughter Frieda.
Luise Romberg Fuchs in her book, 1927, tells about the tremendous changes she had witnessed in her lifetime, and then, “I hope this progress will render it possible for you children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren . . . to have a family reunion on the Colorado on the one-hundredth anniversary of the wedding of Grandfather and Grandmother, Adolf and Luise Fuchs, at the place where my dear parents-in-law . . . on July 10, 1879, celebrated their golden wedding day in the circle of their children and grandchildren and many dear friends . . . So all of you come who can, and see the great-grandparents’ place, where Sister-in-law Ulla’s grandchild, Armin Matern, now lives . . . The old house is no longer standing, and only an old chimney marks the place where once dear, peace-loving folks lived . . . “
These words of my great-grandmother were heeded, and many relatives and friends gathered under large pecan trees on July 10, 1929.  Mrs. Julius (Helene Matern) Kellersberger and Dr. Richard Goeth, grandchildren of the honored ancestors, were selected to impersonate them, and the same pageant of words and songs which had been performed by the grandchildren of Adolf and Luise Fuchs at the golden wedding was now performed by their great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren.
The words of the pageant had been written by Mrs. Conrad Fuchs.  The principal speaker at this centenary celebration was Max Goeth, who spoke of the farewell sermon of his honored grandfather and its significant text, “Now the Lord said to Abraham, go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land I will show you.  And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you . . . “

Fuchs’ 400

Did this man accomplish what he set out to do?  His descendants, according to a genealogy chart prepared by Ernest Guenther of Austin, add up to about 400 accountable persons.  Have they made a great nation of spiritual, intellectual, and righteous people?  Are they helping to develop a Christian community?  The answer to that I do not have, but I do feel blessed for being one of the 400.
In closing, I wish to pay tribute to Adolf Fuchs because he was an optimist and because he was a kind, friendly, helpful, and happy man. Because he, his wife, and children were happy people, they attracted others.  Love breeds love.  Pastor Fuchs wrote the music for a song about it:  “Die Liebe Ist ein Edelstein” (Love is a precious gem which burns year after year without consuming itself.  Though hate explodes throughout the world, Love pursues its steadfast course.)
The Highlander				
Marble Falls, Texas				March 30, 1972

More On The Fuchs Place Is Revealed

The Highlander recently received a letter from the people who used to own the old Conrad Fuchs place near Marble Falls.  The Fuchs family was the subject of a Hill Country history feature in the Feb.10 issue, written by Mrs. Esther Richter Weaver .
Mr. and Mrs. C. T. Hedges, now of Olney, Texas, owned the Fuchs place from 1947 until 1971.
Mrs. Hedges writes that when. she and her husband first bought the place, the elder Mr. Krumm (now dead) told them that the house was built by a Fuchs, whose bride was in the old country.  When, Fuchs climbed a tree to survey his domain, the story goes on, he fell and was killed.  His brother later lived in the house.
Whether this episode is true is not known by The Highlander, but perhaps one or more members of the Fuchs descendants can verify or challenge it for us.
Anyway, the Hedges write The Highlander about the last 25 years of the Fuchs place, saying:  “When C. T. Hedges purchased the land, he began to try to familiarize himself with the place.
“The tract was bordered on the north by the Colorado River and on the south by the Dr. Thomas Ranch.  It was an impossibility to ride from the two boundary lines, due to the dense brush and cedar growth.
‘A high peak near the Colorado River, known as Big Castle Mountain, seemed a likely place to climb for a better view.  He (Mr. Hedges) recalls that halfway up the mountain he killed a bobcat.  Wildlife was abundant.  No one could have dreamed that within five years another dam would span the river and he would have built a cut-stone house on the mountain summit!”  This is now the Morris Elms home.
“On the south end of the old Fox land is the old rock house of Conrad Fuchs.  There is a three-acre field southwest of the house and a large oak tree stands near the southeast corner of the field.
‘Mr. Karl Krumm showed Hedges a grave south of the tree that was the burial spot of a Negro who had worked at the blacksmith shop at Tiger Mill.
“It has been Hedges’ impression that a cavern is south of the old rock house.  The sound of horse hooves passing over the ground indicates a hollow area underneath,” Mrs. Hedges writes.
The Feb. 10 issue of The Highlander, in which the article on the Fuchs family appeared was sold out, due to Mrs. Weaver’s article on the Fuchs family.  However, Xerox copies of the article are available now.
The cost is $1.47 for a complete, seven-page copy of the article, including the photos.  For a three-page set, excluding the photos, the cost is 63 cents.

The Highlander
Marble Falls, Texas							
March 30, 1972

TALK OF TEXAS
By JACK MAGUIRE

	CAPITOL MURDER —  Robbery, not political revenge, was the motive for the only assassination to occur on the steps of the State Capitol in Austin.
	Louis Franke, a member of the House of Representatives from Fayette, had stopped by the office of the House of sergeant-at-arms on Feb. 19, 1873, to pick up his per diem and travel  reimbursement as the Legislature neared adjournment.  Then he had gone down to a Congress Avenue saloon, ordered a beer and paid for it with a large bill.
	Returning to the Capitol about 7 p.m., Representative Franke was attacked by two men who apparently were lying in wait for him on the steps near the main entrance.  He was beaten about the head with a rock, robbed and tossed down the entrance steps. He died a few hours later.
	Although a number of witnesses had noticed two strange men on the Capitol steps and a grocer remembered selling them some beer, they were never apprehended.

The Highlander
Marble Falls, Texas				
January 4, 1979

‘The German Fox’ and ‘Tiger Mill’
Some early history of the fabled Fuchs family

Betty MacNabb	Part One

It must have been just about 100 years ago, say 1879, when the “German Fox” sat down in his study in the two-story stone house on the hill overlooking the Colorado River and penned his New Year greeting to the readers of the American Stockman.
	“When we have come to the days of parting from the old year and are to enter a new year once more, it makes us feel like we should say a few words of friendship to those with whom we are associated.
	“When we were toiling 12 long months and, in looking back, see how little we have accomplished, we must still be hopeful, and begin the New Year with new energy . . . .”
	Hermann Fuchs, known to thousands of readers of newspapers and farm journals in the United States and Germany as a pioneer farmer and stockman who bred Angora goats, was pretty well pleased when he summed up his life as a whole on that long-ago New Year’s, but there were a couple of things bothering him — wolves, and the continuing hostility between North and South after Reconstruction.
	“Of all kinds of occupation, I like farming the best . . . I sometimes feel like quitting all trading and all writing and live as free as the farmer –  with the birds of the woods!
	“Right lately, the wolves have become so numerous in this part of Texas that we hear them howling every night, and even our most skillful trappers appear to have but little success . . .  about the quickest and best way to get rid of wolves, panthers, and wildcats,” he wrote.
	Fuchs (pronounced “Fooks” in Germany and anglicized to “Fox” hereabouts) came from a prominent Hill Country family whose Yankee-sympathizing members had to flee to Fayette County during the Civil War, and his concern about the continuing ill-feeling among his neighbors was understandable.
	“In some papers we notice more hostility between North and South, or, rather, between Republicanism and Democracy,” he noted.  “This makes me feel sad.  Let us hope that harmony and friendship will return and continue among the people of the United States . . . .”
	The Hill Country farmer-writer concluded his New Year message to the Stockman by “Wishing all your readers joy and happiness,” and signed it properly, “H. T. Fuchs”  Many of his published articles used pen names –  the German Fox, Hiram Fox, Uncle Hermann, and The Old Goat Raiser.
	The later ones were datelined Marble Fails –  but the earlier ones came from Tiger Mill, Texas, a post office established in 1872 in his brother Konrad’s home and later moved to his own, that imposing old two-story structure that dominates the hill south of Highway 2147 across from Cottonwood.
	(A neat sign on the gate today identifies Hermann’s home as the Krumm Ranch and next week The Highlander will publish some of Henry Krumm’s stories about his home and life in the Hill Country during the past 50.)

TIGER Mill is believed to have been named by Hermann, and for good reason, according to Esther Richter Weaver, a Fredericksburg historian who prepared a history of the family for Horseshoe Bay developers when they secured a State Historical Medallion for the Konrad Fuchs Home.
	The Fuchs boys were great hunters, she learned.  They were encouraged to shoot wild geese and ducks to secure feathers for feather bedding, as well as deer and other game for the table.  And they didn’t need much urging to shoot the occasional coyote or other varmints that terrorized their mother and sisters.
	Young Hermann, the “baby” of the seven living children when the Fuchs family came to Texas from Germany in 1846, was about 13 when he shot his first “tiger” –  possibly a panther as sizeable as the 137-pound cat shot on the Ross Triple-R Ranch in Burnet County in December.
	The youngster had collected enough lead from old bullets, shot into trees by his older brothers and neighbors, to pour four bullets for a rusty old rifle 22-year-old Konrad had planned to repair.  When the older boys and their father were fencing a small field a couple of miles from home, Hermann headed for a sandbank a half a mile up the river to shoot wild geese.
	Suddenly two huge cats crossed a clearing in front of him, and the family dogs set up a terrific racket and took off after them.  One of the big felines climbed a tree, and Hermann started firing.  The first three homemade bullets were wide of their mark, but the fourth, with twice as much powder behind it as the other bullets, smacked home and the big cat fell.  Hermann raced home to inform his family, none of whom had ever seen a cougar or mountain lion before, that he had killed a tiger.
	Later, when the family built its grist mill, they christened it Tiger Mill.  Hermann, always the “literary” and romantic member of the large brood, also named several other landmarks in the area such as “Moonlight Springs” and the “Castle Mountains.”  (Coming from the flat state of Mecklenburg in Germany, the Fuchses regarded Texas hills as real mountains.)

ALTHOUGH, like the exact construction date of his home, many things are difficult to pinpoint about Hermann Fuchs, it is known that he was born in Kölzow, Mecklenburg, Germany, in 1842 and was not quite four years old when the family sailed from Bremen on Nov. 13, 1845, and arrived in Galveston on Jan. 10, 1846.
	His father, a Lutheran minister who was renowned throughout the Texas Hill Country as Pastor Adolf Fuchs, had been gifted with a league of land in the Republic of Texas and determined to immigrate to escape the oppression and poverty of his native German.  When Texas joined the union in1845, he felt the time was right, and he and his wife, four daughters, and three sons set sail.
	A memoir by one of those daughters, Ottilie Fuchs Goeth, translated from German by her granddaughter, Irma Goeth Guenther of Austin, as Memoirs of A Texas Pioneer Grandmother, describes it as a horrible journey.
	(Young Hermann is first mentioned in family lore when he lost his piggy-bank: he held up the family’s departure by shrieking to his mother, “We have left my gold shilling behind!”)
	Wrote big sister Ottilie: “The old sailing vessels on which one came over from Bremerhaven were gruesome crates . . . One was at sea for 10 to 12 weeks with horrible food and the worst imaginable drinking water.  Our journey in the fall of the year was the worst . . .time to sail.  The food was wretched, the water barely drinkable, and we were seasick throughout the voyage.  It was particularly rough in the North Sea, with its choppy green waves . . . The voyage, lasting for weeks and weeks, seemed endless.”
	The ship, the Gerhard Hermann (which sank on its next trip), put into Galveston on Jan. 10, 1846, and the Fuchs family boarded a small steamer up Buffalo Bayou to Houston.  Eight days later they boarded a wagon drawn by five pairs of oxen and headed west across the “vastness of the prairies” to Cat Spring in Austin County, where it was turning spring.  The first Fuchs home was built there, and it was seven years before Pastor Fuchs traveled on to take up his land on the south bank of the Colorado River in Burnet County.

EVEN after seven years’ residence in Texas, Pastor Fuchs must have seemed an unlikely neighbor to the frontier Hill Countrymen.  He had degrees from three German universities; he spoke six languages and was an accomplished musician.  His large family; which by now included still another brother, Bennie, loved music and sang lustily; one daughter is said to have scared off some marauding Indians by singing at the top of her voice.
	Hermann, irrepressible as a baby, may have become somewhat more subdued when baby Bennie was born. Or he may have become a somewhat introverted “loner” because of the physical disability that bothered him nearly all his life:  he was subject to periodic severe headaches, so severe that he was literally incapacitated for hours or even days.  Migraine, perhaps?
	Whatever the cause, his personal life is less known than that of his brother Konrad.  Most of his exploits, like the tiger “kill,” took place when he was alone, and most of what is known about him came in the form of poems, stories, musical lyrics, and correspondence with journals like Home and Farm and the New York Tribune.
	Hermann married Carolina Romberg (whose sister Luise was married to his brother Willie) and built the two-story stone house and log corrals on the mail route to Burnet, which then crossed the river slightly north of the present bridge and continued on through Mormon Mill.  (Marble Falls was not settled until 1887.)
	He had purchased the land to the south of his father’s home (the Adolf Fuchs home site and cemetery is located on what is now Oak Lane in Cottonwood Shores) by making and selling saddles.  And about the same time he constructed his home.  Hermann Fuchs bought Angora goats from Turkey and brought them to his Texas ranch to breed.
	That he was a happy man, there is little doubt.  He and his wife Lina had three fine youngsters:  the eldest, Albano, inherited the ranch from his father and continued to work it and raise stock until he sold it to the Krumm family in 1909.  [Correction: Albano was the second child of Hermann and Lina Fuchs.]
	His oldest daughter, Frieda, was postmistress at Tiger Mill after the post office (which closed in 1901) was moved from her Uncle Konrad’s home to her own. Hermann’s third child, Johanna, was another daughter, and Hermann and Lina also reared two foster children, Walter and Marietta [Anderson]. 
	If there were any lingering Indian spirits hovering over the old campsite and graveyard on what is now the sloping front lawn of the century-old Fuchs- ranch home, they were surely chased away long ago by the adventurous shade of the “Tigerkiller” who spent his last years there.

The Highlander
Marble Falls, Texas				
January 11, 1979

From Brooklyn to Burnet County
	
Betty MacNabb	Part Two

THE river of time moved slowly during the first 50 years of Hill Country settlement, but by the turn of the 20th century, new currents were rippling and different patterns emerging.
	Fortunes had been made and enlarged or spent; the face of the land was being altered as settlements died and towns were born.  Generations had lived and gone, but the pioneer farmers and ranchers who wrested a living from the granite hills still found meaning and comfort in their friends and kin, and strength in holding onto the laid.
	So it was with ‘Lina Fuchs.  After Hermann died, his widow and their son Albano continued to farm the hundreds of acres on the banks of the Colorado where Pastor Adolf Fuchs’ dying settlement, Lueders ( now Cottonwood was located, and where Hermann had shot a “tiger” and built the home that housed a post office called Tiger Mill until Marble Falls was born in 1887.
	In January 1909, another German family stepped off the train in Marble Falls after journeying south from Brooklyn, New York.  Carl Phillip Krumm, a strapping young German who had stowed away on a freighter and earned his way to New York by helping the ship’s cook, had come to Texas to seek his fortune.
	“Many times later, Mother would tell us children how he looked when he first saw the Hill Country,” smiles his son Henry Krumm, a vigorous, fair-haired, blue-eyed man now 71.  Lapsing into German, Henry acts out the scene.
	“He came back to the Roper Hotel in Frank Jay’s buggy, his face all lit up and blue eyes wide and shining.  ‘I have found it, Liebchen.  This is what I look for, this is where I want to live and die.’  And Mama smiled and hugged him and was so happy for him, for us.”
	Carl Krumm had been stricken by wanderlust at age 17, his son says. When he found himself virtually adopted by the ship’s cook, and later the captain, young Krumm decided the seafarer’s life was not so bad and made several voyages back and forth across the Atlantic. In the meantime, Carl’s younger brother August had also decided to see the world and stowed away on a cargo vessel that put into Galveston.  August had fallen in with some German settlers in the port city and wound up in a German settlement near New Braunfels.
	“Papa had found Mama on a voyage back to Bremerhaven.  She was Antonia Marie Bruns, and they were married in her home, then they came back to New York and Papa left the ship and went into construction.  His papa in Germany had been a contractor for military roads, so Papa knew something about construction.
	“But all the time he wanted his own place.  And when I was born, in a hospital in Brooklyn on October 5, 1907, he was more than ever determined to find a place with trees and water and good land for me to grow up on; he was saving his money.
	“Meanwhile, he had heard from his parents in Germany that young August was in Texas, where it was warm; and when August started to send postcards with pictures of trees and later the Granite Mountain and Marble Falls, Papa got more and more excited.  ‘That’s where we will go, that’s where we belong,’ he told Mama.”

FINALLY they made the long train journey south and changed trains in Austin to board one of the two cars that followed the chugging little engine on the Granite Mountain & Marble Falls City Railroad.  Up the hills, across the Colorado and back across again ran the narrow-gauge railroad line, and Carl Krumm could see the lake glinting before the train finally came to rest in the picturesque village on Lake Marble Falls.
	They stepped off the train there at the corner of Depot Street (now Second) and Avenue N, in front of the little chrome yellow depot where horses and wagons and curious townspeople gathered to watch the train come in.  A towhead about 12 came up to them and introduced himself as Frank Jay; he was driving his dad’s livery wagon, and the Krumms were soon stowed aboard and climbing the hill to the two-story stone Roper Hotel.
	“Papa stepped up to a man and told him he was German and asked if there was any work here, and the man said, why yes, there were lots of German families here and a man named Ernest Odiorne was looking for someone to help out on his ranch,”  Henry remembers.
	The Krumms’ first home here was a one-room cabin, still standing on the top of the hill west of the intersection of US 281 and Texas 71 on the old Odiorne (now Gregg) property near Shovel Mountain.  Their neighbors were the Ebelings, Gieseckes, Odiornes, Richters, Varnhagens, Haunns – German-speaking settlers who surrounded them with large, loving families, gave Carl work and helped them welcome baby Annie Krumm (now Ann Alexander) on June 19, 1909.
	In October, about the time Henry had his second birthday, Carl Krumm entered into an agreement with Mrs. Hermann and Albano Fuchs to work the extensive Fuchs land on shares.  Carl Krumm set to work with a will, and the next spring plowed a 40-acre section where the Cottonwood entrance and grocery store are located today and sowed it to oats.

THE old Hermann Fuchs home overlooking Ranch Road 2147 across from Cottonwood had been vacated by Lina when her husband died, and it stood vacant for a time while she lived at the Albano Fuchs home in Cottonwood.  Eventually, she let an old bachelor named Kaull move into what had been the basement and storerooms when Hermann Fuchs still lived.
	“It was a mess, full of plunder and trash.  The old man trapped and raised all kinds of varmints, raccoons and possums, and kept ‘em caged and fed in the storerooms until they were fattened up for eating,” Henry recalls.  “Kaull never did any real work – just sharpened plows and axes on an old hand grindstone, and dragged in trash that other people threw away and left it lying around outside.  He had a big ash pile where he burned things on the north side of the house, and sometimes neighbors would bring over trash to be burned on the pile.”
	Kaull was sent packing and the Krumms moved in and spent weeks cleaning the house. Then Carl Krumm spent all his spare time in months to come cleaning the yard and the land and outbuildings around the house, building fences and corrals for the stock he was determined to own.  After two years, he leased the Fuchs home and surrounding land from Lina Fuchs.  The Krumms were home to stay.
	By 1913, when Henry was six going on seven, the Krumm Ranch was a thriving operation with cattle and sheep as well as cotton and corn and oats and barley.  That fall Albano Fuchs moved his family to town for the school year, and change came to the south side of the little natural Marble Falls lake that preceded the dams.
	Albano Fuchs had “four or five” school-age children, and the Marble Falls school across the lake was closest.  Flood or freeze made the Colorado impossible to cross part of each winter, so it was simpler to move into town than to try to outguess the river.
	Henry and Annie Krumm missed their playmates – Carolina, Herman, and Vernon Fuchs were all near Henry’s age.  Besides that, Carl Krumm was disturbed because his children spoke no English – all the families spoke German at home.  Carl talked to his neighbors about a school for the southside children; and the next year (1914) there was a one-room school and a teacher, Miss Margaret Hester, who still lives in Bertram.
	There were more children on the southside ranches, too – the Pennys had leased the Konrad Fuchs home from the Odiornes, and the Gibsons, Crownovers, Riddells and Herringtons had taken up land leases.  Miss Hester boarded three months with the Krum ms, then three months with the Fuchses.
	The next year, Miss Emily Lang taught Henry and all the other southside children, and then Mrs. Winnie Hayes of Hoover Valley taught third and fourth grade to the Krumm children.  In 1916, the one-room school was too crowded, so it was closed and the children transferred to the Marble Falls school.  They rode horseback across the hill and down to the river, fording it above the falls to the Lacey pecan groves on the north shore.
	A year later, when the Old River Road was built winding down the hillside to the river falls and old iron bridge, the youngsters could drive the family buggy to school.

HENRY remembers those years with the fondness reserved for childhood – how he and Annie would rise early, light the lanterns and throw wood on the fire, dress in the shivering cold and help milk 18 cows while breakfast was cooking.  Then there were those breakfasts – steaming hot mush or cracked whole wheat with fresh milk and golden homemade butter, sweetened with cane molasses or honey from their own stores in the dark cool pantry downstairs.  For lunch they packed a tin pail with slices of homemade light bread and jelly, and their own homemade German sausages.  When they got into the buggy, Mama handed up the eggs, butter and pints of separated cream to be delivered to the grocery store (located where Barnes Lumber Co. furniture stands now, at Third and Main).
	“Uncle Booth Green used to come out and take it from us when we got up the hill.  After Easter, he’d say, `Well, children, eggs is down a bit today 12½  cents a dozen.’  He always looked for us, and had a little joke or story to tell us,” Henry remembers.
	The World War I years, his school years in Marble Falls, were drought years, and brought an age-old enemy to the Hill Country ranches, Henry remembers.  Like his predecessor Hermann Fuchs in years gone by, Carl Krumm was more and more troubled by wolves, foraging eastward from the plains, searching for vanishing food.
	“Those big old gray wolves were a whole lot different than these little coyotes we see today,” Henry says.  “Papa had a lot of sheep, and when the wolves got so bad we had to build a lot of pens and keep the sheep penned up.  But even that didn’t do any good.
	“I remember one summer when Annie and I were herding sheep.  We were sitting on the grass under a shade tree when Annie looked up the hill and let out a yell.  A ewe was running frantically from this great gray animal, and while we watched he grabbed her and tore out her throat and started sucking the blood.  I grabbed a stick and we started running towards them, but when that wolf turned and snarled at us with that blood all over his muzzle, I threw the stick away and we both ran for home.”
	When the wolves started raiding the sheep pens and got most of the lambs, his father sold off the rest of the flock and gave up the idea of raising sheep, Henry says.

ABOUT that time,1917, Albano Fuchs sold off the rest of his land and moved to Abernathy in Hale County, up in the Plains country, Henry remembers.  He and Annie continued to go to school in Marble Falls to the fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth grades, in the same grade because Annie had started younger than he had.  But when Henry started ninth grade, his father became ill and was unable to work all winter, so Henry stayed home to tend the place and the stock.  In 1921, when Henry was 19 and Annie was graduating from Marble Falls High School, the Krumms were finally able to buy the Hermann Fuchs property outright – some 406 acres at $12 an acre.
	Henry stayed on at home after his father recovered, helping with all the chores that keep farmers and ranchers going from dawn to dusk.
	“We bought a 1920 T-Model Ford in 1922 for $200.  It had wooden wheel spokes, and the front wheels were larger than the back.  I thought it was a fine machine, and I loved to drive it over to Marble Falls when the family went to town.
	“When I went by myself, though, I usually saddled up old Nellie unless I had a date.  I used to go to the movies with 25 cents in my pocket – 15 cents to get into Michel’s silent movie on the third floor of the Opera House before it burned.
	“I would go into the drug store part to the fountain, right where it is now since they restored it, and buy a nickel’s worth of candy from my movie change – E. G. Michel would give me a handful of chocolatepeanuts, a handful of lemon drops and a handful of this and that, all for a nickel.
	“Sometimes I would ride all the way to the gate at home, munching that candy, and still have a nickel in my pocket.”

BUT those peaceful years gave way to the “Hoover crash” in 1928, and the Depression that followed it changed life for Henry as it did for most folks.
	“We were starving to death, like everybody else,  but holding onto the land whether we ate or not,” Henry says.  “Nobody had any money, and there was no way to make any; Papa and I cleared timber, sawed and split a wagon cord of lumber, and sold it for $5 a load when we could get it.  Crops here down to nothing, and hogs were selling for two and a half cents a pound – a 200-pound hog that Wallace Riddell took to Austin for us went for $5.  Eggs were five cents a dozen, or two cases (24 dozen) for $3.  Pecans were three cents a pound, and a load of cedar posts sold for $3.”
	Henry ranged over the Hill Country, seeking a day’s work here, a day’s work there.  In 1935,  he remembers feeding a hay press all day for $1 and his dinner.  Finally, he decided he had better look for better things farther afield.
	“By then, Annie had gone on to pharmacy school and become a registered pharmacist; she had been working for $14 a week as a pharmacist with the Walgreen chain in San Antonio, but had moved to Austin and was a pharmacist at the Austin State Hospital.  That’s where she met her husband, James Alexander from Galveston – he was doing his internship before becoming a psychiatrist there.”	
	Henry set out for Austin in 1936 with $9 in his pocket, planning to head for his home city of New York and look for work there.
	“You’re crazy, Henry,” Annie told him.  “There are three million people looking for work in New York City alone.”  But she had $5 and knew where she could borrow $25 more – so then he had $39 and the one-way bus ticket from Austin to New York cost $24, so he had a little money to spend for food.
	He headed straight for Yorkville, a German community in the Bronx, and had a job paying $50 a month, room and board, in a German-American Odd Fellows Home the next week.  He didn’t return to the Hill Country for good until his father died in 1950.	

DURING the WWII years, he drove a trolley and then a bus in New York City – a job he secured through the good efforts of a Marble Falls classmate, Joe Faubion.  An old injury to his left leg. incurred while he was still herding sheep in the teeth of a blue norther at home in the Hill Country, kept him out of the war.  Instead, he drove a transit bus for Tunisians and Moroccans working in defense plants and shipyards under military defense contracts until the war ended.
	Henry married a Brooklyn girl during those years, and they ca me back to visit the old home place in 194748, after the war was over.  But his wife didn’t like the Texas Hill Country, and employment here was scarce and low-paid at that time.  So the couple returned to New York.
	Then Carl Krumm died, and his son came home to stay – working the Krumm Ranch on shares with his mother until she leased her part of the ranch to Fritz Bruns 10 or 11 years ago.  More recently, Mrs. Antonia Krumm, now 94, has been a patient at the nursing home in Marble Falls, and Henry has carried on alone.  He has no children; neither does Annie, so of course they talk sometimes about what is to happen to the Krumm Ranch eventually.  And they know what they think would he fitting; since part of it will have to go to the state of Texas anyway, for inheritance taxes, they would like to see the old home become a State Memorial Park, with medallion and complete restoration.
	It would be fine if the medallion named it the “Fuchs-Krumm Home.”