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

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

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

John James was a surveyor (and a good capitalist) from Bexar County. With the backing of a San Antonio investor named Gustav Theissen, James bought 1,100 a ...

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