Castroville Alsatian heritage town
— a small Alsace, set down on the Texas plain.
Not only on a wall.
Castroville Alsatian heritage town, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
“A town founded in 1844 by Henri Castro and the families he brought from Alsace, set on a bend of the Medina River west of San Antonio. The old stone houses still carry the hipped roofs and steep gables their builders remembered from villages near Strasbourg. The bakery on the square turns out the same dense, sweet bread the grandmothers brought across. People here still say a few words of the Alsatian dialect, though only a handful at this point. The light on the limestone is the same warm cream wherever the masons came from. from the studio
The place, in three passes.
Castroville sits on the Medina River about twenty-five miles west of downtown San Antonio, in Medina County. The town was founded in September 1844 by Henri Castro, a French empresario who recruited settlers from Alsace, Lorraine, and the Rhine valley under a colonization contract with the Republic of Texas. Within a few years the colony numbered several hundred families and the streets were laid out on a grid descending toward the river. More than ninety original homes and the 1870 St. Louis Catholic Church remain. The Landmark Inn, an 1840s stagecoach stop on the river, is now a state historic site.
The first generation of settlers built in the manner they had carried with them: thick walls of local limestone, lime mortar, hipped roofs with steep pitches, deep-set windows. Many of the surviving houses date to the late 1840s and early 1850s and stand within the National Register Castroville Historic District, listed in 1970. The 1870 St. Louis Catholic Church on Angelo Street, the third on its site, anchors the old town with a square cream-stone tower. The Landmark Inn's two-story stone block on Florence Street is the most photographed building on the river.
The town keeps its old calendar. Saint Louis Day at the end of August has been observed since 1879, drawing several thousand for the parade, the parish dinner, and games on the church grounds. The annual Old-Fashioned Christmas in early December lights the square and the river path. Year of Alsatian Heritage events run through summer at the Landmark Inn. The Medina River park below the dam is open daily and floods softly in spring; cypress along the bank turn copper by mid-November. The bakery on Houston Square keeps its Alsatian pastry list largely unchanged from a generation ago.
