Photo: Charles Feller inside the White Oak school house on the grounds of the Pioneer Museum in Fredericksburg TX

August 10, 2010 - The first day of school will soon bring an end to the carefree days of leisure enjoyed by local children. In earlier times the summer break was no vacation as everyone in the family was needed to plant, tend and harvest crops. School sessions were much shorter in those days, lasting only about eight months out of the year. Instead of a summer vacation children worked along with their parents picking cotton, chopping weeds and tending livestock.

It is significant that the people of Fredericksburg opened the first school in the fall of 1847, a time of great hardship. The majority of the settlers were still living in crude huts struggling to grow enough to feed their families, and yet they had the vision and forethought to open a school. Although living in primitive conditions the German pioneers had a great appreciation of the education, culture and literature many had enjoyed in the old country.

Soon after the construction of the Vereins Kirche was completed in 1847, Mr. John Leyendecker was hired as Fredericksburg’s first teacher. According to Ella Gold’s 1945 thesis, The History of Education in Gillespie County, the Vereins Kirche had no floor or ceiling and the furnishings consisted of crude benches. From sixty to seventy students were under the tutelage of a single teacher. Assorted books garnered by the students who brought them from home served as text books.

The teacher’s salary was funded by tuition of one dollar per quarter. Given the existing conditions, it is not surprising that teachers did not stay in the position for long. A succession of teachers came and went over the first five years including John Leyendecker, Jacob Brodbeck, Rev. Burchard Dangers and Heinrich Ochs.

Religious education was desired by some families so several parochial schools were opened early in the life of the community. Shortly after the founding of Zion Evangelical Lutheran Church in 1852 the congregation established a school which was first conducted in the parsonage. A Catholic school was organized in 1856 with Franz Stein as the teacher. In 1857 a crop failure forced the school to close and Franz Stein went to teach at the Verein school. When the Catholic school reopened in 1858 Christian Kraus was hired as teacher.

In 1854 the state legislature established the public school system and the county court created five school districts within Gillespie County. In the ensuing years the county court also set aside tuition monies for the “children of widows, insolvents, and orphans.” With state funds came the requirement that instruction be delivered in the English language. By this time several one-room country schools had been opened in the small farming communities that dotted the county. Eventually forty-four one room schools served students in the rural areas of Gillespie County.

In 1856 Fredericksburg opened a public school with August Siemering serving as the teacher. Education was disrupted during the dark days of the Civil War as Siemering joined the army and Stein returned to the Catholic school. They were succeeded by Louis Schuetze. Citizens were saddened and outraged when Schuetze was forced from his home one night and hanged by renegade Confederates for the “crime” of expressing Union sympathies.

By 1870 four teachers were employed and a four grade school was established with each teacher assigned to a different subject area. Due to a shortage of space the school was located in four different buildings on or near the Market Square.

Fredericksburg also boasted a college in two different eras. Founded by the German Methodist Church, Fredericksburg College opened in 1876. Both boarding students and the children of local families attended the college and many went on to become prominent members of the community. When the college closed in 1884 the property was sold to the Fredericksburg school district.

A second college, St. Anthony’s College, operated from 1909 to 1923. The college offered a commercial or business course for young men. Women were briefly admitted in 1918 to a “civil service school for stenographers and typists” at St. Anthony’s. The college closed when St. Mary’s High School added a commercial course of study.

Acquisition of the college property in 1884 allowed the public school to bring all of the students together in a central location on what is now College Street. The old college building is still in use today on the middle school campus. Local educator Eugen M. Bittner wrote in the 1936 FHS Mesa yearbook that when he came to Fredericksburg in 1892 “there was only one building with four rooms and four teachers had to do all the work.” He did not state the enrollment figures.

 A number of the early pioneers were university educated and one of these, Dr. Wilhelm Keidel, sent his fourteen year-old son, Albert, back to Germany to study medicine in 1866. This would not have been possible for most families and, in fact, many students were limited by their circumstances to a grade school education in the first decades of the settlement.

A commonly heard expression, “Erste Tod, Zweite Not, Dritte Brot” sums up the lot of the brave pioneers who settled Fredericksburg. Literally translated it means first death, second deprivation, third bread. This statement made reference to the fact that many among the first generation of settlers died prematurely as a result of disease and the primitive living conditions. Their children, the second generation, suffered from hardship and deprivation. But the third generation had bread meaning that opportunity and prosperity had been wrested from the wilderness. This third generation reaped the rewards of the sacrifice and labor of the first two generations and among the rewards was the opportunity to advance their education.

 With more prosperous times in Fredericksburg, families sent their children away to college as early as the first decade of the 1900’s. Some progressive families sent the daughters to college as well as the sons. Early college graduates from Fredericksburg noted in Pioneer’s in God’s Hills, Volumes I and II include:

Emil Sauer, University of Texas (Literature) 1903 and M.A. Harvard University 1907
Julia Estill, University of Texas, M. A. 1905
H.H. Sagebiel, University of Texas (Law) 1907
Hugo Kallenberg, University of Texas (Pharmacy) 1909
Edward Krauskopf, Texas A&M College (Civil Engineering) 1911
Louis Jordan, University of Texas (Electrical Engineering) 1915

Note: Much of the information in this article was gathered from Ella Gold’s thesis, The History of Education in Gillespie County, published in 1945.