Austin Siemering, founder of the San Antonio Express News, wrote of the years and months leading up to the US Civil War in the German-Texas hill country, that “an uncomfortable feeling of uncertainty started creeping on all who opposed slavery, like the feeling preceding a thunderstorm of the worst kind.” You know that part of…
Last month I left you readers teetering on the edge of civil war, and I apologize for any jitters my dirty trick may have caused in your lives as you’ve waited on tenterhooks to find out if the war really happened, or if cooler heads prevailed and they managed to avoid the whole thing. (Tenterhooks…
Ok, so not to get all political right on you long-suffering readers right outta the starting gate, but there is a small chance that some of you savvier folks might’ve sensed and I should preface this by stipulating that this really only applies to those of you who’ve had occasion to inhale oxygen or experience…
I’ve just finished a lovely version of this (what I think is a) fascinating story, and alas, when I read it back over I found that it was about as dry as a mouthful of cinnamon and not nearly as exciting. Scholarly tome, I’ve realized, isn’t really my forte, and besides, it read like an…
So anyway, where were we? Oh yeah… We were talking about the first people to ever live in Texas, many, many long years ago- people who got here 13,000, 50,000, maybe 100,000 years before us, and who have been living on this land ever since. They got here by walking across the Bering Strait from…
ALL THE SINGLE LADIES I want to welcome all our first-time readers along for the ride this month! You’re at the right place, this is that hot new history column trending right now on social media! As my faithful longtime readers can attest, I’ve been covering all the oldest news around here for ten…
Keeping Christ in Christian or How I Lost All My Readers and Sabotaged My Career as a Columnist in Small Town USA Last month I doled out some practical advice to help us all in navigating the holidays with those motley crews of misfits and miscreants we call our families. An important point I…
Well readers, can you believe it’s time for the holidays already? How did this possibly happen, what did we, enter a time warp or something? Here at HQ we haven’t even put away slip & slide! Of course, we still haven’t cleared up last year’s Thanksgiving paraphernalia either and there’s a stack of Dukakis yard…
For a long time I’ve been wanting to tell you the story of a Connecticut Yankee who, before he became famous as one of the first American landscape architects and the guy who designed New York’s Central Park, the grounds of the US Capitol building, the Biltmore estate in North Carolina, university campuses all over…
The Germans left their home and everything they knew, risked their lives in the holds of stinking ships, and landed in the port city of Indianola to find it disease ridden and over crowded. Once there, they were stranded with no food, no housing, and no transportation to the new lives America promised. Relying on…
Ah readers, little do you know how Mama Marjie worries about you guys with Berges Fest fast approaching! I lose sleep over scenarios in which you might be caught short in conversations having to do with local history. I break into a cold sweat at the thought of you bringing shame upon your family by…
The very first road builders in Texas were the American bison, whose scientific classification is the very Roadrunner-esque Bison bison and who might have belonged to one of two subspecies in North America, the Bison bison bison. Here’s something you might not know about the beautiful Texas Hill Country and, as pioneer Boerne settler John…
All of you readers who, like myself, have ever fancied yourself in the role of amateur sleuth, will have already recognized the one big hurdle to getting on in that line of work- namely, the scarcity of murders in one’s close proximity which combine the necessary ingredients of being fabulously complicated- preferably hanging upon a…
Do you guys remember 1492? When Columbus sailed the ocean blue and all that and discovered America? Maybe you dozed off a little because the classroom was nice and warm and you’d just had tater tots in the lunchroom and a fly was droning around pleasantly. When you startled yourself awake the teacher was talking…
