Story · Fredericksburg
We were in Fredericksburg last week working on our new Settlers Crossing property. We wrapped up around four and decided to drive south to Alamo Springs Café for dinner — we had heard about it in our Facebook group but never tried it. That one decision turned into one of the better afternoons we’ve had out here.
A few miles south on Old No. 9 — the Old San Antonio Road — we hit Bankersmith. The sign says population zero and that is accurate. The town started in 1913 as a stop on the Fredericksburg and Northern Railroad, named for Temple D. Smith, the Fredericksburg banker who drove the effort to build the line. Banker Smith. Bankersmith. The depot is long gone. Fire took most of the original buildings in the 1940s. What is there now is a dance hall, a bar called the Boil Shack with a gator across the ceiling beam, and out back an old bus with a goat living in it. Open Thursday through Sunday.
Further south we passed a marker for the Ferdinand Hohenberger farmstead. He left Bremen, Germany in 1855 with his wife Katherine Schultze and their family, spent seventy-three days on the water, landed at Galveston on November 20, and settled first at Luckenbach. He bought this place in 1871. In 1882 he deeded 160 acres to each of his sons, William and Theodor. William ran a store and post office out of one of the buildings and his family lived there until 1914. There are four undated gravestones on the farmstead. The rock buildings are still standing and in remarkably good condition for their age.
Alamo Springs Café sits in a converted saddle shop about ten miles south of town on a county road. Covered deck under the oaks, honor system on the beer fridge. Their burger made the cover of Texas Monthly in August 2009 — half a pound, green chiles and avocado on a jalapeño cheese bun. And worth the drive. The place closed for six months in 2024 and reopened in December under a Fredericksburg native who brought back the original recipes and the original suppliers. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays. No pictures of the place — we were not planning to do anything other than grab a burger and head back to Bandera.
We could see the trailhead for Old Tunnel State Park from the parking lot. Sixteen acres, the smallest state park in Texas, and the entire thing exists because of a hole in a hill. In 1913 the area raised $200,000 to build a railroad connecting Fredericksburg to the line running south toward San Antonio. The 920-foot tunnel under that hill added $134,000 and five months of labor to the project. The railroad was officially abandoned in 1942 and the track was pulled for wartime scrap. The tunnel stayed. About three million Mexican free-tailed bats live in it now, along with a few thousand cave myotis — and rattlesnakes. The volunteers will tell you the snakes and other varmints show up around the entrance at dusk for the same reason you do: something is coming out of that tunnel...but they intend to eat it.
We got there about forty-five minutes before dark, which turned out to be about perfect timing. The bats started coming out as the light dropped, and it is not a trickle — it is a column that lifts out of the canyon and keeps coming long after you expect it to stop. In my video you can see what looks like smoke on the horizon. Those are the same bats, already out and off in the distance. I have never seen anything quite like it in person.
There are two viewing areas — upper and lower. The lower has better viewing and you can pick your section when you book online. We had trouble purchasing tickets through the app, so I would recommend doing that well before you go. They do not sell them on-site, and you cannot get in after five without a ticket. No lights of any kind, no camera flash, no pets. The volunteers are helpful and know the colony well — ask them anything.
The Fredericksburg and Northern Railroad only operated for about twenty-nine years and all the metal sold for scrap in the middle of a war. But the things it left behind — a tunnel full of bats, a ghost town with a dance hall — are now some of the most visited spots in Gillespie County. It failed as a railroad and succeeded as history.
Days like this are why we enjoy wandering the Hill Country without much of a plan. You leave for a burger and come home having learned about a railroad, watched millions of bats take flight, walked through a ghost town, and stumbled across a 150-year-old German farmstead. Those are usually the days you remember the longest.
If anybody knows additional history on the Hohenberger farmstead, I would like to hear it. We’re new to Fredericksburg, so if there’s something to fix or add, tell us.
Go see it. All of this sits south of Fredericksburg on Old No. 9. Old Tunnel State Park · Ask Cooper, our Fredericksburg guide · Bat viewing reservations