06/12/2026
Twenty five miles west of San Antonio sits the only town in the United States founded by settlers from the Alsace region of France. Most Texans have never stopped there.
Henri Castro was born in France in 1786 to a prominent Jewish family. He eventually made his way to America, served as French consul in Rhode Island, and became fascinated with Texas when he met a man in Paris who was trying to negotiate a loan for the struggling Republic. Castro traveled to Texas in 1842 and walked away with a land grant of over a million acres on one condition. He had to settle at least 600 families on it within three years.
He went back to the Rhine River valley and recruited farmers from Alsace, the border region caught between France and Germany, people who spoke both languages, cooked from both traditions, and belonged fully to neither country. Between 1843 and 1844 seven ships carried over 800 Alsatian colonists to the Texas coast.
On September 2, 1844, Castro set out from San Antonio with Captain Jack Hays and five Texas Rangers to find a spot along the Medina River. He laid out his town like a European village, surrounded by outlying farms, with town lots built in the fachwerk timber frame style of the old country, native limestone walls, adobe mortar, whitewashed and unmistakably French.
They endured Comanche raids, drought, locusts, and a cholera epidemic in those first years. They built a brewery, two churches, three stores, and a gristmill anyway.
Castroville is still there today. The Little Alsace of Texas. And many of those original limestone buildings from the 1840s are still standing on the same streets where those Alsatian farmers first walked off the wagons.
