Part 3, Note 32

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Colorado County Bond and Mortgage Records, Book B, p. 230; Bill Stein, Wolfram M. Von-Maszewski, Marie Rose Remmel, and others, transcribers, James C. Kearney and Wolfram M. Von-Maszewski, translators, "Excerpts from the Kirchenbuch of Louis Cachand Ervendberg," Nesbitt Memorial Library Journal, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 46-47; James M. Day, comp. and ed., Post Office Papers of the Republic of Texas 1836-1839 (Austin: Texas State Library, 1966), p. 65. Though the Cummins Creek Post Office was said to be in Fayette County, William Frels was its first postmaster. The 1986 booklet entitled The History of Frelsburg (New Ulm: New Ulm Enterprise Print, 1986) states that the community was once also called Kraewinkel. This name does not appear in any contemporaneous source. As Anders Saustrup has pointed out, Krähwinkel was the name of the provincial town in August von Kotzebue's 1803 play "Die deutschen Kleinstädter" and has since been used, in an amusing and vaguely derogatory manner, to describe similarly provincial small towns (see Jean Gross and Anders Saustrup, trans. and eds., "From Coblenz to Colorado County, 1843-1844: Early Leyendecker Letters to the Old Country," Nesbitt Memorial Library Journal, vol. 1, no. 6, August 1990, pp. 200-201). Some literate members or observers of the community may have used the name as a joke, a joke which went undetected by the less literate, who subsequently and innocently passed the name down to their descendants.