Boerne: Named for a Radical Who Never Came

In eighteen forty-nine a small group of German colonists from the failed utopian settlement at Bettina camped along Cibolo Creek and called their spot Tusculum, after Cicero's country retreat. Three years later Gustav Theissen and John James laid out a proper townsite and renamed it Boerne, after Ludwig Boerne, a German Jewish political writer and satirist who had died in eighteen thirty-seven. Boerne never set foot in Texas, but his radical writings had inspired a generation of young German liberals to seek new lives across the Atlantic.

The community was slow to grow. Only ten houses stood in eighteen fifty-nine, but it became the county seat of Kendall County in eighteen sixty-two and held on to its German cultural identity for generations. The Boerne Schuetzen Verein, a shooting club, has been meeting since eighteen sixty-four and still does.