German Pioneers in Texas; A Brief History of Their Hardships, Struggles and Achievements Page: 91
3 p.l., 230 p. incl. plates, ports. 23 cm.View a full description of this book.
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- 91 -
"He would occasionally correspond with his relatives in
Germany, and I have been told that he always wrote beautiful
letters, teeming with love and kindness and good cheer, and
that in these letters he never referred to his mode of living.
"Astronomy was one of his hobbies, and he used the
windmill tower as his point of observation. The community
finally came to rely pretty strongly on his weather prophecies."He was a man of diversified genius and talent. On one
occasion some one entered his house and stole some whiskey.
This might have been done as a joke, but it riled the old man,
and he forestalled future depredations by rigging up a
burglar alarm. This ingenius contraption was arranged to
fasten on the outside of the lower room door, with a cord
extending into the window of the upper room where he slept.
The slightest movement of the door would cause the suspended
weight to fall on the old man and wake him up. The fact
of this precaution became well known, and as the old man
always kept a gun, no one ever cared to experiment with the
burglar alarm to see whether it would work or not. Every
one took it for granted that it would work, and considering
the hermit's perfection in the matter of making things that
would work, this was doubtless the sane and proper conclusion
to reach.
"I don't know what ever went with the windmill, the
tower nor the hand organ. They seem to have just completely
disappeared."
Like many a great genius he passed away "unwept, unhonored
and unsung."
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Biggers, Don Hampton, 1869-1957. German Pioneers in Texas; A Brief History of Their Hardships, Struggles and Achievements, book, 1925; Fredericksburg, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth29394/m1/97/: accessed April 26, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting University of Texas at Arlington Library.