Castroville: The Little Alsace of Texas

Twenty-five miles west of San Antonio on the Medina River, the town of Castroville feels like a village that arrived from the wrong continent. The steep-pitched roofs, thick limestone walls, and shuttered windows that line its streets come from a very specific corner of Europe: the Alsace region, a territory that has passed back and forth between France and Germany across centuries of war, and whose inhabitants developed an architecture and a dialect all their own.

The man who brought Alsace to Texas was Henri Castro, a Portuguese-born French-Jewish diplomat and entrepreneur who negotiated an empresario contract with the Republic of Texas on January fifteenth, eighteen forty-two. The contract promised him more than a million acres of South Texas land if he could introduce at least six hundred colonist families within three years. Castro traveled to Alsace and the Rhine Valley, recruiting settlers from a region still recovering from the Napoleonic Wars and hungry for land.

On September second, eighteen forty-four, Castro led a small party of colonists out of San Antonio, accompanied by Texas Ranger John C. Hays and five of his men. They chose a site on the bluff above the Medina River, a day's wagon journey from San Antonio on the freight road to Chihuahua. They called it Castroville. Between eighteen forty-two and eighteen forty-seven, Castro brought more than twenty-one hundred colonists to Texas, making him second only to Stephen F. Austin among empresarios in the scale of his achievement.

The settlers built in the fachwerk style of their homeland, using native limestone and timber plaster to reproduce the houses they had left behind. Saint Louis Catholic Church, completed in eighteen forty-four, was the first church in Medina County. Today Castroville retains more intact Alsatian architecture than perhaps any other community outside Alsace itself, and the Texas Historical Commission has designated the entire town as a historic district.