Editor’s note: This is another in an ongoing series of articles we call “Marking History” looking at the stories behind the hundreds of historic markers scattered about the Crossroads.
Most of the land that Riverside Park sits on once belonged to a German immigrant couple whose son fought for both the South and the North during the Civil War.
The couple’s home, dating from the late middle 1800s, still sits at the corner of Vine St. and Roseland Avenue.
The “Friedrich and Margaretha Hiller House” is at the edge of the park with a historical marker calling it “the oldest extant structure of the historic Spring Creek Community.”
Friedrich and Margaretha Hiller emigrated to the United States in either 1851 (as on the marker) or 1852 (as in historic texts at the Victoria Regional History Center).
They left Doettingen, Germany, and sailed to Galveston and then inland to Indianola, before settling in Victoria.
Many German families emigrated to America during this time, fleeing a failed democratic revolution in Europe.
The revolutionaries were called Forty-Eighters, and many were wanted men in Europe. Much of the Texas Hill Country was settled by German Forty-Eighters who refused to support the Confederacy during the Civil War.
Carl Schurz, a popular Union general, was a Forty-Eighter. He later became the U.S. Secretary of the Interior.
The Hillers brought with them a son, born in Germany in 1842. His name was Cristoph Hiller, known as Adam.
Hiller’s obituary appeared in the Dec. 14, 1930, Victoria Advocate and explained his dual service during the Civil War. He was 88 years old when he died.
“He was 19 at the outbreak of the Civil War and in July 1861 enlisted as a Confederate soldier, fighting with valor with the Southern forces in several important battles,” the obituary said.
He served in Victoria’s Company B, Sixth Texas Infantry.
Hiller was captured at the Battle of Arkansas Post on Jan. 11, 1863, and confined at a camp near Springfield, Illinois (Abraham Lincoln’s hometown).
“A month later he became a Union soldier by taking the oath of allegiance and received an honorable discharge at the close of the war after participating in many major engagements under Sherman,” the Advocate reported.
Friedrich Hiller died of a severe cold on Jan. 2, 1881, according to an article in “The History and Heritage of Victoria County,” compiled by the Victoria County Genealogical Society. Margaretha died one year later from an asthma attack.
The historic marker noted that Adam Hiller’s brother Johann Michael moved into the home after the deaths and the home became known, for a while, as the “Mike Hiller House.”
Meanwhile, Adam Hiller married a Victoria native, Julia Schiwitz, and fathered 13 children.
No documentation at the Regional History Center told how Hiller was received upon returning home after changing sides during the Civil War. He lived the rest of his life peacefully in Victoria.
One of the couple’s sons, Johann Adam “Doc” Hiller, farmed the family land at Riverside Park.
“He also hauled sand and gravel from the land near the present-day 14th green of Riverside Golf Course,” reported the Genealogical Society.
The city of Victoria started buying the Hiller land in 1935, according to the historic marker. The purchases continued until 1998.
One final note: The Hiller land, much of which is surely worth a fortune today as Riverside Park, was valued at a mere $2,600 in 1870, according to census information in Roy Grimes’s “300 Years in Victoria County.”
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