Gruene: The Town the Dance Hall Saved

A few miles north of New Braunfels along the Guadalupe River, the village of Gruene was built by German cotton farmers in the eighteen seventies. Ernst Gruene bought land when New Braunfels was full, and his son Henry turned the family property into a company town: a mercantile, a cotton gin, a dance hall. By the early nineteen hundreds Gruene was the banking and shipping hub for the whole Guadalupe River cotton belt.

Then came catastrophe in threes: Henry died in nineteen twenty, the cotton gin burned in nineteen twenty-two, and then the boll weevil and the Depression closed every business except the dance hall. The town sat nearly empty for fifty years. In nineteen seventy-five, Pat Molak bought Gruene Hall and began a slow restoration.

Today it is billed as the oldest dance hall in continuous operation in Texas, and the ghost town it once was draws visitors from across the state.