Willkomme zu Castroville!

Unwinding comes easy at Landmark Inn State Historical Park, where history and nature intertwine. The building that houses the namesake inn dates to 1849, and was once a store and stage stop.
In his travels through frontier Texas in the early 1850s, New York journalist Frederick Law Olmsted was astonished to find European cuisine served at Castroville’s Tardé Hotel, which boasted “napkins, silver forks, and radishes, French servants, French neatness, French furniture, delicious French beds, and the Courrier des États-Unis,” a French newspaper published in New York. To Olmsted, who later became a noted landscape architect and North America’s premier park planner, Castroville resembled a European village, one “as far from Texan as possible.”

His observations would have pleased empresario Henri Castro, who had described the Republic of Texas more than a decade earlier as “one of the fairest lands on earth.” Enticed by Castro’s spirited promotions, immigrants from war-weary Germany, France, Switzerland, and the French-German region of Alsace began coming to this frontier west of San Antonio in 1844.

By the time of Olmsted’s visit, Castroville was a thriving farming community, supporting merchants, wheelwrights, and blacksmiths. Freighters and other travelers passed through town on the San Antonio/El Paso Road. Its commercial and residential structures already exhibited the appealing blend of European craftsmanship and adaptive design preserved over time and generously displayed throughout the town (pop. about 2,700) today.

See the full article in the August 2001 issue.

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