Not "Latin" as in Latin America, but Latin as in the language of Ancient Rome. Latin as in the language spoken by a unique group of the cream of German intellectual, philosophical, journalistic and noble society called the "Freethinkers", who emigrated a thousand strong to Texas and flourished briefly in the years before the Civil War.
Because they considered Latin essential to a cultured life, and often spoke Latin or Greek during meetings to discuss the latest scientific and cultural developments of the time, the towns they founded in what was then the Republic of Texas became known as the "Latin Colonies."
The Latin Colonies included Luckenbach, (latterly more famous as a hangout for "Waylon 'n Willie and the boys"), Boerne, Sisterdale and Comfort and were scattered through the broad valleys and rolling hills of Central Texas about 90 miles west of Austin.
They were such forward thinkers that, long before the development of the internal combustion engine and the BMW motorcycle, they managed to plop themselves down in the midst of some of the best riding country in the state, which is what brought me to their midst - only about 150 years too late.
The group, as a whole and as individuals, are worth a Larry McMurtry saga, and if he doesn't write it, maybe I will have to.
Composed of world-famous surgeons, writers, philosophers, engineers and German nobility, the Freethinkers were the culmination of nearly three centuries of intellectual development during the Age of Reason and were chafing in Europe under the religious and social restrictions of the early 19th century. Europe was chafing under them, as well - their writings and pronouncements were so powerful that they sparked an 1848 revolution in Germany before embarking for Texas.
No less a light than Frederick Law Olmstead visited among them and pronounced them a marvelous concentration of reason and civility in America. Their members founded schools, surgeries, the San Antonio Express newspaper and came close to inventing the airplane half a century before the Wright Brothers. They were gentlemen farmers, inventors and philosophers in the mold of Washington, Jefferson and Franklin, whom they so greatly admired, and they thought they had found their land of liberty at last.
Long story short - I'll save it for the novel - their dedication to the freedom and development of every human being led them to an absolute opposition to slavery, which didn't sit well in Texas as it joined the Confederacy in seceding from the Union in 1861.
Their Freethinking principles - they wouldn't sign the Confederate Loyalty Oath, for one - led the Texans to harass, forcibly conscript, and ultimately murder many of them. Virtually their whole next generation was wiped out during the War. After the war, a few Freethinkers stayed on in Texas, moving to more urban areas, and others went back to Germany, their experiment in founding communities of reason crushed by the backlash of America's bloody Civil War.
Riding Tuesday along the river bottoms, over the hills, and through the wide valleys that once were theirs it was not hard to imagine that in this place an ocean away from their homes, they had found an earthly heaven more satisfactory to them than the Biblical one they rejected.
I've headed this piece with a picture I took of a bust of Ernst Hermann Altgelt, one of the Freethinkers, which stands in a park in Comfort, which he founded.
