BADER SETTLEMENT, TEXAS. Bader Settlement was five miles west of Castroville on the Old San Antonio Roadqv in central Medina County. Joe Bader built and operated a hotel by a spring-fed watering hole there around 1860. He sold the land to August Hutzler and moved the hotel to another location around 1880 after the spring went dry. Bader settlers built a one-room schoolhouse in the late 1800s on property owned by Sterley Jagge. School records indicate an enrollment of fifteen and one teacher in 1897. By 1915 children from the community attended school in Dunlay. In 1935 the original spring at the hotel site resurfaced and continued to flow on land owned fifty years later by Stanley Haby, the grandson of August Hutzler.
Bibliography: Castro Colonies Heritage Association, The History of Medina County, Texas (Dallas: National Share Graphics, 1983).
Ruben E. Ochoa
