Tusculum

Did you know that we could have been the Tusculum Greyhounds or the Tusculum Chargers? Boerne wasn’t the first German settlement along the Cibolo Creek. How did the Germans immigrants, (an immigrant is a person who travels to another country to live), arrive in this very spot along the Cibolo Creek?

Inspired by Ludwig Boerne’s writings and unhappy with social conditions in Germany, a group of forty well educated men left Germany and endured many difficulties and hardships to travel to Texas to seek a better life. They wanted to form a colony that guaranteed basic human rights for all. They were called Freethinkers. Their colony was called Bettina and it was near Fredericksburg. It failed within a year because although all of the forty spoke Latin and were very well educated, they were not educated in the ways of living and surviving the harsh conditions of frontier Texas. Most of the Freethinkers went back to Germany, but a group of eight immigrants wanted to try again to find a place for their colony. The German immigrants followed the old native trails through the Hill Country. The most important trail through the Hill Country was known to the Spanish as The Pinta Trail. Where the Pinto Trail crossed the Cibolo Creek is where Boerne was founded.

Three years after the founding of Tusculum, Gustav Theissen and surveyor John James staked out our present town of Boerne in 1852. The picture below shows the original plan for Boerne. They named the town Boerne after Ludwig Boerne, the German poet and philosopher.