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“Hotel
Where Lincoln Stayed Still Operating,” reads the headline on the
yellowed 1950 newspaper clipping.
That a hotel might be in business nearly a century after Abraham
Lincoln spent the night in one of its rooms would not be particularly
remarkable in Illinois – say Springfield – or Washington. But the
“Lincoln slept here” assertion appeared in a Texas newspaper and
referred to a historic hostelry in New
Braunfels.
Honest Abe? Lincoln in Texas?
First some background. The hotel was the Plaza, so named because
it stands across from New
Braunfels’ town plaza at the corner of Seguin and San Antonio
streets. Built of limestone and cedar in 1851 by Adolph Nauendorf,
the at first two-story structure was offered to Comal
County for use as a courthouse in 1852. Balking at the $3,000
asking price, county commissions said no thanks.
Jacob Schmitz, one of the German immigrants who had founded the
town in 1845, bought the property in 1858. Since at least 1854,
he had been operating a stagecoach stop nearby on Seguin Street
he called the Guadalupe Hotel. Continuing under the same name at
the new location, in 1873 he added a third floor and renamed the
hotel for himself.
New
Braunfels being a good day’s horseback ride from San
Antonio, and two days by wagon or stagecoach, the hotel saw
a lot of business.
In 1854, Frederick
Law Olmsted, who would go on to design Central Park in New York,
hit town on his tour of Texas.
“There was nothing wanting,” he wrote of Schmitz’s hotel when it
was at its original location. After describing the pink-walled main
room, he raved about the meal he had: “…Excellent soup, two courses
of meat (neither of them pork and neither of them fried), two vegetables,
compote of peaches, coffee with milk, wheat bread, and beautiful
sweet butter.”
Eighteen years later, the poet Sidney Lanier spent a night at the
hotel.
“We arrived just a night-fall,” he wrote, “found a large clean German
town, with all manner of evidence of German thrift on every hand,
through which we passed to the hotel, where mine host, a large-framed
and seemingly larged-souled German, was ready with a chair for the
ladies to step on [presumably as they alighted from the stagecoach
that stopped at the hotel.]”
Like most inn keepers, Schmitz kept a guest register in a large
bound book. Over the years, in addition to Olmsted
and Lanier, numerous notables – from military officers to Sam
Houston – lodged at the hotel. One of the guests was Jefferson
Davis, U.S. Secretary of War before he became president of the Confederate
States of America.
And, if the Schmitz-Plaza’s guest register is to be believed, the
man who would be Jefferson’s polar opposite during the Civil War
also enjoyed the hotel’s hospitality at some point between its opening
and his election as 16th president.
But if Lincoln ever came to Texas,
much less the Schimtz Hotel in New
Braunfels, the trip is a part of his well-examined life yet
to be explored. If he did visit Texas,
it would have been at some point between the time the hotel opened
and 1860, when he ran for the presidency. Had Lincoln come to Texas
after then, we’d be reading distinctly different American history
books, since he was persona non grata with most Texans even prior
to his election.
Lincoln never had much money, and travel was hard back then. A review
of his life’s story suggests the closet he ever got to Texas
was New Orleans, which he visited in 1831 when Louisiana’s neighbor
to the west was still a province of Mexico.
Not that the future Great Emancipator didn’t know about Texas,
which by the time Lincoln got elected to Congress in 1847 had become
the 28th state. As a freshman lawmaker, Lincoln was outspoken in
his criticism of President James K. Polk and the war with Mexico
that began in the spring of 1846.
More than likely, at some point in the late 1850s as the tall, thin
lawyer from Illinois became better known as an eloquent opponent
of slavery, some unknown traveler thought it funny to scribble Lincoln’s
name in the Schimtz’ register. In later years, people more familiar
with the president’s name than his background accepted it as fact
that he had visited Texas before the Civil War.
By the summer of 1950, when the story claiming Lincoln had stayed
in New
Braunfels ran in the Austin American, the hotel was known as
the Plaza. Its owners and operators were P.E. Short and his wife.
“I wish Abraham Lincoln could come back and see the changes time
and people have made since…Jacob Schmitz build the hotel,” Mrs.
Short told Comal County historian Oscar Haas, who wrote the story
on the Plaza.
The Plaza stayed in business until 1961, closing after more than
a century of operation. The New Braunfels Conservation Society bought
the old building in 1969 to keep it from being razed, and more recently,
it has been remodeled and opened as a vacation and short-term rental
property. If you visit, ask for the Lincoln bedroom.
© Mike Cox
"Texas Tales" July
26, 2012 column
Related Topics:
New
Braunfels
Rooms
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