DANGERS, GOTTLIEB BURCHARD (1811-1869). Gottlieb Burchard Dangers, pioneer pastor and teacher, was born in Langenhagen, Hanover, on October 11, 1811. He left Europe on October 10, 1845, on the brig Johann Dethardt and arrived in Galveston on January 12, 1846. He conducted open-air religious services for German immigrants in Galveston and upon arriving in Indianola six weeks later founded a congregation of 700. After five months he moved on to New Braunfels, where he worked as a day laborer to earn money to reach Fredericksburg, his ultimate destination. At the end of 1846 he received additional money from relatives in Germany and bought land on the Guadalupe River. Dangers was married to Mathilda Max; their first child was born on March 16, 1848.
Dangers finally moved to Fredericksburg in 1849 and served as pastor of the Evangelical Protestant Church for the next twenty years. He became an American citizen on May 13, 1851, and was the third teacher at the Vereins Kircheqv school. He was succeeded by Heinrich Ochs on January 1, 1852. From February to March 1861 four of the Dangers' five children died of diphtheria; another daughter was born on April 3, 1861. During the Civil War Dangers again taught school, and in 1867 he became one of the first ten teachers in Gillespie County to receive state teaching certificates. He also organized a male singing quartet and composed a number of unpublished musical scores. In 1869, while walking back to town from a wedding he had performed in the country, Dangers was caught in a sudden rainstorm; he developed pneumonia and died on November 12 of that year. He is buried in the Fredericksburg City Cemetery.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Gillespie County Historical Society, Pioneers in God's Hills (2 vols., Austin: Von Boeckmann-Jones, 1960, 1974). Elise Kowert, Old Homes and Buildings of Fredericksburg (Fredericksburg, Texas: Fredericksburg Publishing, 1977).
