As the 175th anniversary of DeWitt County approached in 2020, members of the DeWitt County Historical Commission began preparing for a grand celebration commensurate with the county’s rich history. One of the commission members, Beverly Bruns of Yorktown, discovered C.H. Waltersdorf’s “Geschichte von DeWitt County” [History of DeWitt County] among her family papers. It is the only known extant copy of this history of the county that was written in German and published in 1899, and beyond the fact that Waltersdorf had briefly published a German language newspaper in neighboring Lavaca County, Die Lavaca County Nachrichten, almost nothing was known about him. The president of the commission, Peggy Ledbetter, recognized the value of the forgotten history and agreed that a translation of the same would be nice addition to the planned celebration. Mary Gayle Brindley, another member, approached me about a translation. After a quick perusal of the scans, which were all legible, I agreed to undertake the translation. In addition to the translation itself, I was able to put together a short biography of Waltersdorf and I have commented extensively on Waltersdorf’s “History” through endnote. My annotated translation appeared initially as an article in the April 2023 edition of the Southwestern Historical Quarterly and, subsequently, as a book self-published by the DeWitt County Historical Society. The book was expanded to include an essay on Rudolph Kleberg as a founding father of Cuero and several of his heretofore unpublished writings including a short autobiography and a short history of the town of Cuero.
Carl Herman Waltersdorf was born in Germany in 1872 and died in Cuero, TX, in 1937. He lived an extraordinary restless life marked by many abrupt twists and turns. He came to the United States in 1889 with a brother at the age of seventeen to join his parents who had emigrated to Texas twelve years previously in 1877. But once settled, the teenager soon found employment as a typesetter with the Deutsche Rundschau, a German language newspaper published in Cuero where he learned the newspaper trade at an early age. In 1895 he established his own German language newspaper, The Lavaca County Nachrichten, in neighboring Hallettsville in 1895. Waltersdorf penned his “Geschichte von DeWitt County” [History of DeWitt County] in 1899 which he advertised in his newspaper and sold as a supplement for twenty-five cents. He travelled around the county to give talks and promote his “History”.
Waltersdorf’s” History” is delightful and charming on several levels but mainly because it highlights interesting families and fascinating characters from everyday life, the people who are often left out of standard histories but whose collective contributions built communities from nothing into viable and charming places to live. But there is another aspect to Waltersdorf’s history that is quite noteworthy. DeWitt County is now remembered chiefly because of the Sutton/Taylor feud, the largest and bloodiest feud in American history, which played out over a period of ten years or so after the Civil War between various factions in the Anglo community. Numerous books and articles have been penned about this feud but none of these standard accounts mention that there was a large and growing German community in the county with various individuals occasionally caught up in the bloodshed but, by and large, whose members were onlookers, innocent bystanders to the terror and mayhem occasioned by the feud. Waltersdorf has provided us with the first history of the feud from the German community’s point of view, and it is quite fascinating, because it offers a case study for acculturation and adjustment in an extreme situation.
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