The New Braunfels Academy was an independent school run by Texas Germans in New Braunfels Texas, in the latter half of the 19th century. The Academy offered from five to seven classes or grades of study, taught up to 220 students, employed from three to six teachers, and operated approximately ten months of the year. Students ranged in age from five or six and up, and most classes were conducted in German. The school was absorbed into the Free School System of the State of Texas in 1888.
The minutes of the trustees of the New Braunfels Academy provide an administrative and operational record of the New Braunfels Academy, in New Braunfels, Texas, covering the period of the Academy until 1892, four years after the Academy lost its status as an independent school. The document, written predominantly in German but with English sections interspersed, consists of some 400 pages of handwritten minutes taken at several hundred meetings of the Board of Trustees, rules and regulations for the functioning of the Academy, by-laws for the Trustees’ meetings, financial records, attendance rolls, etc. Implicit in the rather straightforward record of names, dates, and events, is the twenty-year struggle of a German community to maintain control of its own independent educational system in the face of financial pressures, the Civil War, and ultimately the centralized school system of the state government.
The collection is open for research use.
New Braunfels Academy Minutes, 1858-1892, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin.
Basic processing and cataloging of this collection was supported with funds from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) for the Briscoe Center’s “History Revealed: Bringing Collections to Light project,” 2009-2011.