Black New Braunfels: A History That Should Be Easier to See

New Braunfels has become very good at telling one part of its past. Visitors quickly learn about German immigration, the Adelsverein, sausage, dance halls and architecture. That history deserves its prominence. But it can create the false impression that the city’s past was ethnically simple.

It was not.

African Americans have been part of Comal County since before the Civil War and remained part of New Braunfels through emancipation, Reconstruction, segregation, industrialization and the modern tourism era. Their numbers were comparatively small, which made their institutions even more important: churches, neighborhoods, cemeteries, family networks, businesses and community organizations carried memory when the larger public narrative often did not.

The numbers explain visibility—but not importance

The 1860 census counted 193 African Americans in Comal County. By 1870, after emancipation, Black residents made up 7.1 percent of the county population—still far below the statewide share. By 1980, the proportion had fallen to roughly one percent. Those figures help explain why Black history is less visible in the built landscape than German history, but they do not justify treating it as marginal. A small community still has churches, schools, occupations, property, kinship networks, celebrations and burial grounds.

Allen Chapel AME and Live Oak Baptist: institutions before monuments

The City of New Braunfels now explicitly identifies Allen Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church and Live Oak Baptist Church as anchors of Black history. Allen Chapel’s congregation dates to 1890; Live Oak Baptist was organized in 1900. The dates matter, but the institutions matter more.

In African American communities across the South, churches often functioned as far more than Sunday worship spaces. They were places for leadership, mutual aid, education, meetings, funerals, organizing and the preservation of family and community memory. In a city where Black residents were a small minority, those functions were especially significant.

Segregation is visible in the cemetery landscape

One of the clearest pieces of physical evidence appears in the City’s historic-preservation study of municipal cemeteries. Comal Cemetery included a separate area identified as the Freedman’s Section. The preservation plan notes that the area was intentionally segregated and originally delineated by a fence. The fence is gone, which means a modern visitor could walk the landscape without realizing what the spatial arrangement once meant.

Work and everyday life

The surviving public summaries are much stronger on German commercial history than on the occupations of individual Black residents. That imbalance is itself instructive. It means a serious reconstruction must move beyond tourist narratives into census schedules, city directories, deeds, church records, newspapers, military records and oral histories.

The City’s current cultural-planning language is unusually direct: generations of Black residents raised families, worked, worshiped, owned businesses, educated children and served neighbors in New Braunfels. Tony’s Guide will treat those categories as a research agenda rather than a ceremonial sentence.

Juneteenth in present-day New Braunfels

The history is not frozen. New Braunfels now recognizes Juneteenth as a city holiday, and in 2026 the City and the New Braunfels MLK Association held a public Juneteenth celebration at Fischer Park. Public commemoration does not substitute for historical interpretation, but it makes Black history visible in a visitor identity that has traditionally centered elsewhere.

What still needs to be recovered

• named Black families in the 1870–1940 federal censuses;
• property ownership and residential patterns;
• Allen Chapel AME and Live Oak Baptist leadership and membership histories;
• the Freedman’s Section and associated family names;
• Black-owned businesses and occupations in city directories;
• military service and veterans;
• schooling and segregation;
• oral histories held by local families and institutions.

Why a visitor should care

Because history changes what you see. Once you know that segregated burial space, Black congregations and multigenerational community institutions existed here, New Braunfels stops looking like a culturally uniform German town that later became diverse. It becomes what it actually was: a place where several communities lived alongside one another, with very different levels of visibility and power.

That is a more complicated story. It is also a better one.