CHERRY SPRING, TEXAS. Cherry Spring is on Cherry Spring Creek a half mile south of the Mason county line and 16½ miles northwest of Fredericksburg in northern Gillespie County. The site was originally settled by Dietrich Rode and William Kothe, who left Fredericksburg in search of land in 1852. According to some sources Rode had built a small Lutheran church at Cherry Spring in 1849 with lumber shipped from Austin. Later settlers included William Marschall, Conrad Ahrens, Ludwig Spaeth, and Adam Schneider. Cherry Spring was on the route from San Antonio to El Paso and thus enjoyed a moderate prosperity as a commercial center. A number of the early settlers were sheep ranchers. The Cherry Spring post office was established in 1858, and by 1860 the town had a population of 202, 142 of whom had German surnames. In 1897 John O. Meusebachqv was buried at Cherry Spring. The community's post office closed in 1912. Its population was estimated at forty in 1933 but by 1964 had fallen to nine. In the late 1960s, however, Cherry Spring grew, reaching a reported population of seventy-five by 1970. Its population was still seventy-five in 2000.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Rudolph L. Biesele, The History of the German Settlements in Texas, 1831-1861 (Austin: Von Boeckmann-Jones, 1930; rpt. 1964). Sara Kay Curtis, A History of Gillespie County, Texas, 1846-1900 (M.A. thesis, University of Texas, 1943). Joe Tatum, "History of the Gillespie County Livestock Industry," Southwestern Sheep and Goat Raiser, July 1946.
Martin Donell Kohout
