Sisterdale Historical Marker

The marker stands on FM 1376 beside the old dance hall, at the middle of a settlement that was never formally platted. Engineer Nicolaus Zink built the first house here in 1847 on the 1,280-acre William F. Wilson survey, and the families of Ottmar von Behr, George F. Holekamp, Julius Dresel, Carl Beseler and Ernst Kapp followed.

Von Behr proposed the name Sisterdale, after the nearby Bosom Hill, Sister Hills and Twin Sisters, and had the creeks renamed from Sisty's to Sisters — Sisty being William R. Sisty, killed on Henry Karnes's 1839 expedition by the accidental discharge of his own rifle.

Many who arrived after 1848 were refugees of the failed German revolution, and the community became one of the Hill Country's Latin settlements, so called because its residents read and argued in that language. Frederick Law Olmsted visited in 1854 and was struck by their free-thinking intellects.

The two markers conflict on one point. This one dates von Behr's appointment as first postmaster to 23 October 1847; the von Behr marker, a mile and a half south, puts the petition and the appointment in 1851.