Cherry Springs, Gillespie County

As the German families moved north from Fredericksburg and started new
communities, schools and churches always followed.  Cherry Springs was one of the early settlements in mid 1800's

 

The church at Cherry Springs is an incredible stone church that was completed in 1906 and is still in use today. 

 

Very little remains of the community of Cherry Springs except just across the road from the church is the Diedrich Rode Complex which consists of a group of stone and wooden buildings dating to 1870's.  One of these is a three story stone building in which the lower two stories were used as a residence and the upper floor was used for a warehouse.

 

The entire area is enclosed with a tall slated fence which makes it impossible to make pictures of the complex.  I asked one of the workers that came out of the main gate if it would be possible to get pictures of the buildings.  He told me he would have to call long distance to get permission and it would take several days.....end result is no pictures.

 

 

From the Texas State Historical Association Handbook on Texas

CHERRY SPRING, TEXAS. Cherry Spring is on Cherry Spring Creek a half mile south of the Mason county line and 16½ miles northwest of Fredericksburg in northern Gillespie County. The site was originally settled by Dietrich Rode and William Kothe, who left Fredericksburg in search of land in 1852. According to some sources Rode had built a small Lutheran church at Cherry Spring in 1849 with lumber shipped from Austin. Later settlers included William Marschall, Conrad Ahrens, Ludwig Spaeth, and Adam Schneider. Cherry Spring was on the route from San Antonio to El Paso and thus enjoyed a moderate prosperity as a commercial center. A number of the early settlers were sheep ranchers. The Cherry Spring post office was established in 1858, and by 1860 the town had a population of 202, 142 of whom had German surnames. In 1897 John O. Meusebach was buried at Cherry Spring. The community's post office closed in 1912. Its population was estimated at forty in 1933 but by 1964 had fallen to nine. In the late 1960s, however, Cherry Spring grew, reaching a reported population of seventy-five by 1970.