Ep. 130: The Sisterdale Revolver

Wise About Texas

Ken Wise

Texan, Places & Travel, Education, Texas, Cowboy, History, Society & Culture, Culture, Jacinto, Texans, San

5 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 20 August 2024

⏱️ 25 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the early part of the Civil War, a group of German Freethinkers got together to design and manufacture a revolver for use by the Confederate forces. These Germans were intellectuals, engineers, farmers and...unionists! Nevertheless they designed a new revolver, making 6 total. The gun proved impractical, however, so they ceased production. Only one of these guns is known to survive. But this story is about much more than a gun. Get a feel for some of the German immigrants who came to Texas in the middle 19th century in this episode of Wise About Texas.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Howdy and welcome to Wise About Texas, the Texas History Podcast. This is your host Ken Wise. Thanks very much for
0:14.0	tuning in today for a little Texas history. I want to start today by
0:18.0	thanking everybody for the great feedback on the two-part interview with
0:22.4	Governor Perry.
0:24.0	Governor Perry is the longest serving governor in Texas history 14 years and that is not likely, that
0:30.2	streak is not likely to be broken anytime soon, so it's a rare occasion you get to actually
0:35.3	interview someone who has made Texas history was a lot of fun I want to thank
0:40.9	Governor Perry personally for his time and enthusiasm about not only the interview
0:46.4	but just his service to Texas and his love for this state.
0:51.3	One of the things that I've mentioned on this episode before and one of the things that I know affects many listeners of this podcast is the idea that you start out researching something in Texas history and you discover
1:04.4	all sorts of interesting characters and events and you make some connections that
1:11.2	you may not have known existed. Well today's episode is one of
1:15.9	those episodes. I had intended to do a fairly brief episode about a gun and we are going to talk about a gun, a very rare gun.
1:25.0	But it turned into a lot of information about some very interesting characters
1:31.0	who had immigrated from Germany.
1:33.7	We've covered German immigration before in several contexts on this podcast and we're going to do
1:39.1	it a little bit again from a bit of a different angle using some interesting characters and
1:44.7	interesting circumstances around the Civil War in the Hill Country.
1:49.2	And we're going to start with a little trip to the Hill Country town of Sisterdale, Texas.
1:54.2	So let's go back to Sister basics around the German immigration in the
2:09.6	1840s. That immigration started with a land grant that was granted in the 1830s to a man named Frederick Ernst and this would later become the town of industry Texas in northwest Austin County. Later as conditions in Germany got
2:26.4	more difficult there was a society formed called the Society for the Protection
	...

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