The Germans settled here in the mid 1800’s, that’s pretty early for Texas. There were English speaking settlements in the eastern part of the state and I suppose Spanish speaking people in the south. I can see where 20% could be the German speaking settlers.
In San Antonio, there were more German-speakers in 1900 than either Spanish-speakers or English-speakers. And, of course, there were clusters of German colonies all around the area. They extended all the way north toward the Red River and down south to the Rio Grande. A place named Pilot Point north of Dallas surprised me by having been founded by Germans. Of course, nearby by is Sanger. Many roads have German names.
The German character of these towns is mostly lost, of course. How German were they? In New Braunfels, a town near San Antonio, I got gas about forty years ago, and when he heard I was fromt East Texas, he reached out to be like a neighbor in a foreign country. He had been living there for several years and still was not used to the Germans. I told that even in German, strangers were not easily welcomed. Even today a man may marry a woman from another village and be thought of as a stranger after more than five years.
Many of the German immigrants to Texas were recruited by noble land developers like Prince Solms with leaflets describing the great potential for them in a new free land.
A lot of them left Germany during the 1840s as a reaction to the militarization of the Prussians. Some of the liberal Germans that immigrated were so highly cultured that among the first organizations they started in those frontier villages were string quartets and mannerchoirs.
By 1860, the largest ethnic population in Texas was of German extraction, most of it centered in San Antonio and the Hill Country northwest. One town, Fredericksburg, made a treaty with the Comanches who controlled that area of the state that was never broken.
In the 60s I used to be approached on the streets of some of the old German towns like New Braunfels and Fredericksburg by older residents who would speank to me in German because my appearance made them think I was of local German extraction.
Wonderful festivals full of ‘gemutlichkeit’ in those old German towns.