Comfort: The Freethinkers' Town

The German settlers who arrived here in eighteen fifty-four were a particular kind of immigrant: freethinkers, forty-eighters, political liberals who had fled the failed revolutions of eighteen forty-eight in Europe. Ernst Altgelt laid out the town on the banks of Cypress Creek, and the community organized itself along cooperative lines, deliberately resisting formal government. They did not build a church for nearly forty years.

The settlers had come here seeking relief from the political repression they had left behind. The town was a center of Union sentiment during the Civil War, and in August eighteen sixty-two a group of German men attempting to reach Mexico and avoid Confederate service were ambushed at the Nueces River. A monument in Comfort, erected in eighteen sixty-six, still marks that loss.