Page 26 - 2025 Comfort Chamber Membership Directory

the history of Comfort, texAs
Comfort, the second largest town in Kendall County, is located at the junction of State Highway 27, U.S. Highway 87, and Interstate Highway 10, sixteen miles northwest of Boerne on the western edge of the county.
The town’s history began in 1852 as part of the massive migration from Europe caused by an exploding population and a rapidly changing economy that drove people o the land into overcrowded cities. There was little future in those European cities or on the land which was controlled by a wealthy few, and little opportunity for individuals to advance or for their children’s futures to improve.
The 19th century was a revolutionary period in European history, and the area that would emerge as Germany some forty years later showed signs of fomenting revolt. Some joined the revolts and others emigrated to avoid the violence. In the mid-1840s, a group of German noblemen organized the Adelsverein to buy land in Texas and begin transporting settlers to the Texas Republic (soon to become a state by 1845.) The earlier American Revolution resulted in a democratic Republic that contained large expanses of unowned land generating a further enticement. The Adelsverein created a number of towns on the edge of the Texas frontier, however, it was poorly administered from the homeland and ended in the late 1840s. Once the immigration began, though, it continued even after closure of the Adelsverein.
In 1852, a German family, the Wiedenfelds, and an Alsatian family, the Schladoers, settled along the banks of the Cypress Creek above its con uence with the Guadalupe River, and in 1854, an enterprising German immigrant, Ernst Hermann Altgelt, was sent by a New Orleans land speculator to lay out the town of Comfort near the site of an Indian campground. Fritz and Betty Holekamp built the rst house in Comfort, which was actually under construction before Comfort’s o cial founding on September 3, 1854. Political refugees, freethinkers, middle- class German families, and liberals from Bettina and Sisterdale settled the Comfort
area. As a community of German immigrants, who were Freethinkers and abolitionists, the townspeople organized along cooperative lines and functioned through community organizations and volunteers rather than formalized local government. A public school was opened in Comfort shortly after its founding, and the rst community church was not built until 1892.
Comfort was the County Seat of Kerr County from l860 – 1862. Then in 1862, Kendall County formed out of the existing counties of Kerr and Blanco, thus moving the boundary line of Kerr and making Comfort part of the newly formed Kendall County, with Boerne as the County Seat.
The town of Comfort was only six years old when Abraham Lincoln was elected president of the United States, bringing the long- brewing crisis over slavery to a head. Lincoln’s election and the major con ict between the States posed a real problem that divided some of the local settlers. Most Comfort settlers were opposed to slavery, but they now lived under a Texas government that had joined the Confederacy in support of it. Several local men actually served in both armies at di erent times during the war, but Comfort was primarily a center of Union sentiment and lost many young men at the Battle of the Nueces in 1862. A large monument on High Street near the old high school campus (now the middle school) honors those 35 men whose bones were gathered after the war and interred in a mass grave under the inscription Treue der Union (Loyalty to the Union). Beginning on the 125th anniversary of
the monument in 1991, the ag has own at half-sta 24 hours a day in perpetuity.
In the aftermath of the Civil War, Comfort citizens settled into
An Antique Town!
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