There are so many people who came to Texas from that part of Europe. German names are everywhere!
Shiner Bock, brewed by the Spoetzl brewery, also started by German immigrants, brewing the kind of beer they were used to.
And of course between Dallas and Texas, you have the Czech Stop in West, Texas (which is not in west Texas) which is a great place to stop for some kolaches on the rip.
It’s a controversial topic in Texas, especially since I live in Dallas as an adult, but since you mentioned the food and drink legacy- the immigration waves that come through Galveston/Houston continue to make absolutely amazing food scenes.
A set of my great grandparents were actually a Czech immigrant who married a German immigrant. First part of my life I thought everyone in the world ate kolaches every weekend for breakfast, lol. Also, when modern Texans say kolaches they generally mean a sausage klobasniky. The Czech stop is a well know spot, but the thing that distinguishes them and some other places in West is they still serve a wide variety of actual kolache (fruit/sweet).
As a child, I also ate them for breakfast every time I spent the night at my grandparents' house. I'm in Houston now, and this afternoon I was talking to a neighbor from the town of West (which is a few hours northwest of here). My Czech grandparents lived an hour south of Houston but the neighbor and I both agreed on how much we like prune kolaches. I also love apricot. Some places use canned fruit which might taste fine to someone who doesn't know better, but it's a terrible clash with memories of what my grandmother made (and what some of my cousins still make), and I refuse to pay for them at any shop which does that. We also talked about the poppyseed ones, and how for us it's so heartwarmingly nostalgic but often other people who didn't grow up with poppyseed struggle to understand the appeal.
6th gen Texan here with a very german sounding last name. My dad's side of family immigrated from Switzerland through Galveston. The original surname was sprinkled with umlauts. Someone tried Americanizing the name so people could pronounce but we still have pronunciation problems... and with the new spelling, French people think I'm one of their own.
A few years ago we did a road trip through that part of Texas, looking at the "painted churches" (https://thedaytripper.com/the-painted-churches-road-trip/ - there are other itineraries). This article sparked that memory, as one of the painted churches is actually a Wendish church.
And yes, there's a painted church in Shiner as well! :-)
I hadn't heard of Wends until today. I'm Czech Texan, and more Czechs ended up in Texas than any other state, but of course we were still outnumbered by the German immigrants, so I'm not surprised by a subset of immigrants I didn't know about coming from that region. I haven't toured the painted churches, though many people I know have done so. Their story sounds pretty interesting, and I'm quite delighted to see this come across HN.
Yep, I grew up in Texas and tons of German-Czech influence. Hruska's beats on kolaches for my money, if it's on your way :)
There are also some hidden historic dance halls that are great if you can make it by. I know one dates to 1912 and a buddy's family refurbished it last year; lovely place.
Just before New Years, we were headed to The Woodlands from my hometown in Bell County, and passed through Zabcikville. I decided to get a hostess gift for the high school friend we were visiting, so dropped into Green's Sausage House for a dozen kolaches. I figured I'd be out about $30-40, given how expensive everything else had gotten both where I live now and where I grew up.
It was still $16.
The cottage cheese and the peaches and cream are the best two, in my opinion, followed closely by the cream cheese and the apricot.
If you're eating lunch behind the wheel, their sausage and sauerkraut "kolaches" (more like sausage rolls, but made from the same dough as the sweet kolaches) are an excellent option. One is a heavy snack, two are a solid meal.
Discovering that there were kolaches over the border in Czechia after moving to Central Bavaria: happiness!
Discovering that those are more like what Americans would call a danish than a Central Texas kolache: heartbreaking.
Plenty of Swedes also. Creating churches and schools. German/Swede congregations helped each other. Later it was the Irish who renovated, buying up old neighborhoods, creating today's hospitals and universities.
Interestingly, the diaspora is mostly concentrated around the same area too. New Sweden and Lund, TX are located just east of Austin, which is fairly close to the area mentioned in the article (Giddings) and the original Sweden, TX and Norway, TX are located south/southeast. Those towns are not terribly close, but also given Texas size, relatively close to above.
Hear hear! Fortunately HEB sells it so I don't have to make it all the way to a Prasek's store. Their sausage recipe is the closest flavor to the sausage my Czech Texan grandparents would make, although my grandparents often had venison mixed in as one of the meats.
My wife is a Wend, and so we visited this area in Texas. One of the things I found interesting was that there was a local paper that printed articles in German, English, and Wendish (Sorbian) – there’s a link in the Wiki article. The church we visited was so beautiful.
I appreciate the humor but this confuses me. I also read in a biography of Thomas Jefferson that he reviled Calvinists, going so far as to say their God is not the God of the Bible. I genuinely do not understand what is so reprehensible about Calvinist doctrine. There is just so much theological noise to parse through whenever I research it. Is pre-determination the biggest issue?
Yes, the predestination. It removes from humans any agency in their own salvation, and any action of consequence in their lives. Everything is predetermined, the whole world is just a mechanical puppet show.
It's an internally consistent view of the world. But it turns all the biblical events where humans appear to have agency into just silly scripted scenes, and it also turns the passion and self-sacrifice of Christ another scripted scene (with the Gethsemane episode thrown in for sadistic melodrama, apparently).
I'd say that (strict) Calvinism is the least Christian of the various sects that have attained mainstream success. Paradoxically, it produced some very sober and ultimately successful approaches to the earthly life.
Yeah, predeterminism, along with limited atonement, and perseverance of the saints, combines to form, IMO, a theology that is toxic at best, abusive at worst.
If I can massively oversimplify, it's a theology where Jesus came to redeem only the Elect that God had already chosen to be saved while he had chosen to send everyone else to hell, so that the Elect could see His mercy (to them, not those poor bastards on the down escalator).
And, perseverance of the saints is the icing on the cake, because it came to mean that if you ever disagreed with your church or its elders, well, you obviously weren't one of the Elect at all, enjoy the hellfire.
So it's a great theology if you want to run a small, obviously better than everyone else, in-group of the Saved, vs. all the unsaved sinners God has already condemned.
To see how perverse it could become in the extremes, look at the role it played in apartheid.
Man, multiple people were ready to "go in on" Calvin which really wasn't what I intended. I was recently drafting a little ten part quick and dirty comparison of Christian denominational views on the most important/relevant theological concepts and reading about the Old Lutherans in this post really made me think about how seriously they took these things because they were literally true to them. It is either an admirable or a terrifying thing depending on your perspective.
To answer your question as well as I can from their perspective, the reformed understanding of pneumatic presence vs their understanding of the sacramental union and being forced to participate in the eucharist in that heretical way, would quite literally be grounds for leaving the continent.
Probably because Texas had just recently become a state at that point and because of the Adelsverein and/or the number of ethnic Germans already there.
Driving through Giddings you can still see signs for the annual Wendish festival.
Pondering what that was all about I did some Googling and learned about the Wends as I drove through.
Gruene has a fossil shop with a no returns policy. The sign used to say something along the lines of "you can't return it, no matter how much your pastor says you'll go to hell; if you're that worried, bury it: that's where it came from!"
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Shiner Bock, brewed by the Spoetzl brewery, also started by German immigrants, brewing the kind of beer they were used to.
And of course between Dallas and Texas, you have the Czech Stop in West, Texas (which is not in west Texas) which is a great place to stop for some kolaches on the rip.
A set of my great grandparents were actually a Czech immigrant who married a German immigrant. First part of my life I thought everyone in the world ate kolaches every weekend for breakfast, lol. Also, when modern Texans say kolaches they generally mean a sausage klobasniky. The Czech stop is a well know spot, but the thing that distinguishes them and some other places in West is they still serve a wide variety of actual kolache (fruit/sweet).
And yes, there's a painted church in Shiner as well! :-)
There are also some hidden historic dance halls that are great if you can make it by. I know one dates to 1912 and a buddy's family refurbished it last year; lovely place.
It was still $16.
The cottage cheese and the peaches and cream are the best two, in my opinion, followed closely by the cream cheese and the apricot.
If you're eating lunch behind the wheel, their sausage and sauerkraut "kolaches" (more like sausage rolls, but made from the same dough as the sweet kolaches) are an excellent option. One is a heavy snack, two are a solid meal.
Discovering that there were kolaches over the border in Czechia after moving to Central Bavaria: happiness!
Discovering that those are more like what Americans would call a danish than a Central Texas kolache: heartbreaking.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gruene_Hall
It's an internally consistent view of the world. But it turns all the biblical events where humans appear to have agency into just silly scripted scenes, and it also turns the passion and self-sacrifice of Christ another scripted scene (with the Gethsemane episode thrown in for sadistic melodrama, apparently).
I'd say that (strict) Calvinism is the least Christian of the various sects that have attained mainstream success. Paradoxically, it produced some very sober and ultimately successful approaches to the earthly life.
If I can massively oversimplify, it's a theology where Jesus came to redeem only the Elect that God had already chosen to be saved while he had chosen to send everyone else to hell, so that the Elect could see His mercy (to them, not those poor bastards on the down escalator).
And, perseverance of the saints is the icing on the cake, because it came to mean that if you ever disagreed with your church or its elders, well, you obviously weren't one of the Elect at all, enjoy the hellfire.
So it's a great theology if you want to run a small, obviously better than everyone else, in-group of the Saved, vs. all the unsaved sinners God has already condemned.
To see how perverse it could become in the extremes, look at the role it played in apartheid.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afrikaner_Calvinism
To answer your question as well as I can from their perspective, the reformed understanding of pneumatic presence vs their understanding of the sacramental union and being forced to participate in the eucharist in that heretical way, would quite literally be grounds for leaving the continent.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adelsvereinhttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Germans
Das Yehaw
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Really lucky that these dialects persisted long enough that we have recordings of them.