Farmers, Ranchers, the Land and the Falls - Texas Parks & Wildlife ...

Farmers, Ranchers, the Land and the Falls
Figure 2. Fuchs’ mill on Cypress Creek, 1880. Photo from Ottilie Goeth, Memoirs of a
Texas Grandmother, reprinted with permission from Eakin Press.
on the land previously owned by William Evans, and began to operate a mill
on Cypress Creek. Fuchs’ mill ground corn and sawed lumber from the huge
cypress trees that lined the creek; it soon became the center of a community first
called Fuchs’ Mill, and then Cypress Mill. 9 Frederick (“Fritz”) Fuchs, a distant
cousin of Wilhelm, also moved to the Fuchs’ Mill area about 1867 and began
to acquire property there. Otto Fuchs, another relative, became part of Carl
Goeth’s houshold about 1869, serving as the tutor for the family’s children. Julius
Romberg, Wilhelm Fuchs’ brother-in-law, also moved to the area. 10 The Goeths
and the Fuchses formed the nucleus of a German community that for a while
grew, flourished and shaped the development of the Pedernales Falls area.
Indians continued to raid Blanco County into the 1870s, sometimes striking
near Pedernales Falls. In July 1869, for example, a large mounted Indian raiding
party killed settlers on Cypress Creek about three miles east of Round
Mountain—a woman, Mrs. Phelps, was scalped—then moved east to Cypress
Mill and on to Pecan Creek, “stealing horses as they went, and killing those [horses]
they could not capture.” 11 In June 1870, J. T. Cleveland of Cypress Mill reported
to the Austin Republican that a group of local men had attacked a group of
Indians near Round Mountain, killing four of them. By the early 1870s, however,
the Indian threat had diminished considerably, and new groups of immigrants
had begun to move into Blanco County and the Pedernales Falls area. 12
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