Sisterdale is a unique community near Luckenbach, on the back way from Fredericksburg to Boerne. Part of its charm stems from the fact that it is one of the oldest Hill Country communities (founded in 1847, it had a post office by 1851), but much is due to the nature of its founders and the fact that growth and progress have largely bypassed the picturesque little town.

The first settler was Nicolaus Zink, a civil engineer from Germany who, just two years earlier, had built the first wood palisade in New Braunfels and surveyed the town for Prince Carl. He was on his way to Fredericksburg when he discovered Sister Creek and built a two-story log house in what was to be Sisterdale. He gained the reputation of being a successful farmer, of holding his own against the Comanches, and of getting a good price for the wheat he sold to the quartermasters of the neighboring army encampments.

He was joined during the next two years by a number of educated Germans, and Sisterdale became what some called “the literary capital of West Texas” -- the most prominent of the so-called “Latin Communities.” Ottmar von Behr, the second permanent settler in the Sisterdale area, built his log cabin to the South of the Guadalupe River and his homestead contained the first post office and the first library for the colony and the county.

By the time the famous German travler and journalist Frederick Law Olmstead came to visit in 1856, Sisterdale consisted of “eight to ten farms . . . within social distance of one another,” and about a dozen single men “up and down the Guadalupe, living in huts or caves, earning a tough livelihood mainly by splitting shingles.”

But the sturdy Germans didn’t let hardships destroy their intellectual side. Olmstead wrote later of log cabins “with romances and philosophies piled in the corner” and “Madonna in oil” on the wall with “a dozen guns and rifles,” Deerskins covered the beds, clothes hun ...

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