Ernst, Friedrich b.June 18, 1796; Neustadt-Goedens, Grand Duchy of Oldenburg d. May 16—July 10, 1848; Industry,Texas
One of the earliest German settlers of Texas when it still belonged to Mexico, prior to the Texas war for independence and the establishment of the Republic of Texas in 1836.
Friedrich Ernst was instrumental in the emigration of many other Germans to Texas in the nineteenth century.
In 1831 Stephen F. Austin, proprietor of “Austin’s Colony,” granted Ernst a league of land (ca. 4,428 acres) in what is today Austin County. On the west bank of Mill Creek, Ernst founded the town of Industry, arguably the earliest surviving German community in Texas. Only months after his arrival, he wrote an open letter (dated February 1, 1832) to a friend in his homeland, calling for Germans to settle in Texas. This letter was published in at least one newspaper and circulated widely in manuscript form in northern Germany. Ernst described Texas as a land without winter, with soil requiring no fertilizer, and with a climate akin to southern Italy’s. His appeal received still wider distribution when Detlef Dunt’s guidebook for German emigrants to Texas, Reise nach Texas: nebst Nachrichten von diesem Lande fur Deutsche, welche nach Amerika zu gehen beabsichtigen (Journey to Texas: With Information about This Land for Germans Planning to Go to America, 1834), reprinted it with much additional material encouraging emigration to Texas.
The man known to history as Friedrich Ernst was born Christian Friedrich Ernst Dirks in a small community in the grand duchy of Oldenburg in northwestern Germany. He came from modest origins; his father was a gardener in the ducal gardens. The younger Dirks also acquired a knowledge of gardening. He married well; his father-in-law was a judicial official in another small town in Oldenburg. Ernst worked as a clerk in the ducal post office. In the fall of 1829 he left Oldenburg with his wife and their children.
After arriving in New York late in 1829, the family ran a boarding house there for a year, long enough to be recorded in the census of 1830 under their new surname, “Ernst.”From New York, Ernst and his family set out for Missouri in February 1831 under the influence of Gottfried Duden’s popular book, Bericht uber eine Reise nach den westlichen Staaten Nordamerikas und einen mehrjahrigen Aufenthalt am Missouri in den Jahren 1824, ’25, ’26 und ’27- In Bezug auf Auswanderung und Uber- bevolkerung (Report on a Journey to the Western States of America and a Stay of Several Years along the Missouri during the Years 1824, ’25, ’26, and ’27, 1829). One of the earliest handbooks instructing Germans how to emigrate to Texas, Duden’s book focused on the wonders of that territory. En route to Missouri, the Ernsts changed course and sailed to Texas via New Orleans at a time when Stephen F. Austin was seeking to gain European settlers for his colony in Texas.
Working together with another German, Charles Fordtran, whom he met in New York, Ernst developed a little German colony within Austin’s. In 1838 he officially laid out the town he called “Industry” and sold town lots there. By then he had a substantial truck garden and a large orchard. Some historians have gone so far as to attribute the introduction of orchardry in Texas to Europeans, particularly Ernst. He became known also for the cigars he had made in a small “factory” on his premises. His other crops included cotton, as well as maize for both animals and humans. Early on he traded a quarter of his land for about a dozen cows, and before long he was raising hogs and chickens. Like many other early settlers, he was a man of many trades. He is reported to have run a store in Industry at some point. About 1840 his wife opened a hotel—the term at first expressed more wish than reality—in the large new house he built in Industry. By the mid- 1840s, part of the large stream of German immigrants moving up from coastal regions to the interior of Texas passed through Industry, and not a few of them, especially officers and representatives of the sponsor of much of this stream, the Adelsverein (Society for the Protection of German Immigrants in Texas), were guests at the hotel.
In 1842, immediately prior to the great surge in the volume of German emigration to Texas, perhaps as many as several hundred Germans were living in Industry and its immediate vicinity. By 1860, the town itself may have increased to as many as 1,400. In 2000 its population was a mere 304. Valiant efforts have been under way to preserve what is left of the historic settlement. When Ernst died in 1848, he left only a modest estate, valued in the dollar of the day, at some $3,400. The man who had abruptly departed his native duchy twenty years earlier had become the founder of a town in Texas, justice of the peace for the western section of Austin County, and member of the County Commissioner’s Court of Appeals (a body whose main concerns were building roads and encouraging the operation of ferries).Walter Struve
See also Adelsverein; Duden, Gottfried; Dunt,
Detlef; Texas
References and Further Reading
Biesele, Rudolph L. The History of the German- Settlements in Texas, 1831-1861. San Marcos: German-Texan Heritage Society, 1986.
Lindemann, Ann, James Lindemann, and William Richter, eds. Historical Accounts of Industry, Texas, 1836-1986. New Ulm: New Ulm Enterprise Printing/Industry- West End Historical Society, 1986.
Struve, Walter. Germans and Texans: Commerce, Migration, and Culture in the Days of the Lone Star Republic. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996.
York, Miriam Corff. Friedrich Ernst of Industry. Giddings: Nixon Printing, 1989.