San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Family burial ground survives on N.E. Side
At the end of a cul-de-sac in the Longs Ridge subdivision in Northeast San Antonio, there is a black wrought-iron gate, in good condition, that says “Tampke-Steubing Cemetery.” The area behind the gate is overgrown and seemingly not maintained at all. Do you have any information on this property?
— John Hughes Also known as the Tampke Cemetery, this family burial ground contains more than 30 known graves on private property between Twohill Pass and Tampke Park within the Longs Ridge subdivision.
It was established, as was customary in the 19th century in rural areas, on a family farm, which first belonged toWilhelm Ludewig August Tampke, born in 1833 inWolfenbuttel, Braunschweig, Germany. According to research by his grandson Howard R. Tampke, he was a preacher and schoolteacher as well as a farmer, and he became a U.S. citizen in 1871, as reported in an article on the cemetery in Bexar County Cemeteries, vol. 1, a publication of the San Antonio Genealogical and Historical Society.
“This book reflects research that was done over the years by several SAGHS members,” said Steve Mabie the society's president, who has provided copies of the relevant pages. Researchers in 1978 and 1998 made lists of marked burials of Tampke, Steubing and other family members. (Other surnames include Applewhite, Elrod, Homburg, Keilman, Loessburg, Stow andWalker.)
Surviving markers at the time of those surveys dated from 1862 to 1975. It's noted in the society's book that five markers and gravesites noted in 1978, including an already illegible wooden cross, could not be found in 1998.
Earlier markers, through the first two decades of the 20th century, bear inscriptions in German, with English becoming more common along with intermarriage with Anglosurnamed families. The patriarch, known as August Tampke, died in 1892. His grave is in the fourth of four rows of markers visible at the time of the historical society's surveys.
The area where the farm was located is identified with theWetmore community, which centered on its former post office on what's now Thousand Oaks Drive nearWetmore Road. As with other family cemeteries, upkeep can be an instance where nobody's job gets done by nobody.
“The lack of private cemetery maintenance is a problem throughout Bexar County,” Mabie said. “The county and city claim no responsibility, and the families are usually ignorant of their responsibility, (while) the developers think their responsibility ends when they do not build on the cemetery.”
QUEEN OF MYSTERY:
Former San Antonio Express freelance writer Penelope Borden (whose career as a singer and a writer was covered here Sept. 27) may unwittingly have become the source of what might be a tall tale about an area resident she profiled in the Express,
July 26, 1925, says Marlene Richardson, co-author with Jeanne Dixon of a 2008 book, “The Settlement of Leon Spring, Texas: From
Prussia to Persia.”
Richardson, who also produced the “San Antonio Remembered” series of nostalgia programs for KLRN-TV, was familiar with the story of Sophie and George Frederick Von Plehwe, who came to Texas from Prussia in the 1850s to settle near present-day Leon Springs, where they operated an inn and stagecoach stop.
In Borden's 1925 story, she mentions the stone houses on the Von Plehwe property and credits the family who built them with having “transplanted a tiny section of a European court to the wilderness of the Boerne hills.”
Among the “picturesque tales told of their early life” was that Sophie Von Plehwe was formerly an
opera singer and a lady-inwaiting, having been brought up in the household of the Prussian queen. This story added a fillip of glamour to the legend of the Von Plehwe stage stop, but when a German researcher looked into it more recently, it appeared there was no there there.
“I'd often wondered if it was true that Sophie was raised in the palace of the Prussian queen,” said Richardson, who became acquainted with German writer Barbara Ortwein, author of three books of historical fiction on German immigration to the Texas Hill Country: “BetweenWorlds, Never to Return,” “In the Heart of Texas but not yet at Home” and “At Journey's End: Texans Forever.”
Ortwein visited here several times during her research for the books and was intrigued by the romantic Von Plehwe story of
Sophie's journey from royal to rustic.
For the past few years, said Richardson, the novelist “has tried to find any records of Sophie (in Germany), to no avail,” looking under different spellings of their names in hopes of finding a relative with descendants to contact and even perusing the private archives of the Queen of Prussia Society. With no documentation to back up the fairy tale background, Ortwein, said Richardson, “thinks perhaps Sophie made up the story she gave to Penelope.”
Back then, it was a lot harder to check international records for a story, especially on a newspaper deadline. Yet Borden was meticulous in loading facts into the column and stories she wrote for the Express from 1923 to 1929. If Sophie Von Plehwe had added a little rich embroidery to her history, the reporter, in good faith, might have dutifully included it in her story about the “little bit of Central Europe” on the edge of the Hill Country.
“Sophie, I guess,” Richardson said, “will remain our mystery woman.”