Castroville Historic District

Castroville is an Alsatian community spread along both sides of the highway where it crosses the Medina River, twenty-five miles west of San Antonio. Ninety-six surveyed buildings date from 1844 to the 1880s and share a consistent character. Early houses were small two-room and loft structures of stuccoed limestone with tin or cypress shingle roofs, often with a rear kitchen giving a saltbox profile. Walls about eighteen inches thick kept interiors cool by day and warm at night, and decoration stayed simple even where Victorian brackets appear. Churches, commercial buildings and the courthouse share the same proportions. The town grew from a colony brought by empresario Henri Castro, who sent colonists, mostly from the Rhine Valley, to the Republic of Texas in the early 1840s. By 1847 about seven hundred people lived in seventy houses. Because the railroad and industry bypassed the town, its Alsatian look survived, and later additions have kept to the original scale.