Grapetown
A ghost town in Grapetown, Texas, Grapetown is filed here for what the record attaches to it. Ghost town in Grapetown; research record. HauntHunt files it with ghost towns. The dossier holds 1 documented fact — a documented spine with no haunting reports attached. Visitor status is unverified; confirm before making the trip. Names, dates and reports are filed together here, so the record stays honest about which is which.
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Is Grapetown haunted?
No claims are filed here — the record keeps this place for its documented history, not for a haunting on file.
The record — long form
Grapetown is the German settlement that kept its shooting club — the Gillespie County community on the Pinta Trail where Doebbler's Inn opened in 1860 at the creek crossing, where the ranchers sold to Schreiner and the Unionists hid from the Confederate patrols in the hills after the Nueces. The Schuetzenfest that the town hosted first in 1887 — a hundred forty kegs in four days — is the county's still.
The inn closed in 1915, the school consolidated in 1944, and the town is down to the stone schoolhouse the community bought for a center. The Germans who settled it left the shooting club and the singing and the stone building they put up by subscription — the Hill Country community that the highway's rerouting passed by.
The file keeps Grapetown: the Doebbler Inn, the Unionist holdouts, the Schuetzenfest, and the schoolhouse the community kept.
Grapetown is the archive's Hill Country file — the German stage stop and the festival that outlasted the town.
Why this file matters
Grapetown is the archive's Hill Country file — the Doebbler settlement, the Union loyalty, and the Schuetzenfest that still runs.
A town that lost its highway keeps its festival — the file's suggestion being that Grapetown's hold is the club: the singing-shooting society that predated the decline, and the community that kept gathering after the town stopped being one.
Grapetown is an unincorporated farming and ranching community 9.5 miles (15.3 km) south of Fredericksburg, situated on South Grape Creek in Gillespie County, in the U.S. state of Texas. It is located on the old Pinta Trail. Grapetown is noted for being the site of the first annual Gillespie County Bundes Schützenfest. The school was designated a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1984, Marker number 10048.
Grapetown, TexasDocumented history
A school and cemetery survive from the nineteenth-century German community. The town's documented rise and abandonment is the record the rest of the file stands on. The fact is historically verified — the part of the file that doesn't need hedging. Sources including 'Ghost Towns' carry the record. The date is part of the site's documented spine.
Verified historyTexas Parks & Wildlife Magazine
Sources on file
- 01Ghost TownsTexas Parks & Wildlife Magazine · government · A1
Field notes & open questions
2018 state-magazine discovery source. Contemporary occupancy, surviving structures and access need current owner verification.