Hasse House
Built in 1883.
By 1856, five German families had settled along upper Willow Creek, seven miles east of what would become the town of Mason. At the time, the German enclave was known as the Willow Creek Settlement and was called home by the families of Heinrich Kothmann, Ernst Jordan, Heinrich Hasse, Heinrich Hoerster, and Ernest Dannheim, some of whom had been aboard the same ship when, in 1845, they made the 45-day journey from Germany to the Texas coast.
Playing House on the Frontier
Heinrich Eduard Engelhard Hasse was eleven when he emigrated to Texas in 1845 with his father, Heinrich Carl Gottfried Hasse, his stepmother, and stepsister. Soon after arriving, his stepmother came down with cholera and died, leaving his father to remarry once again, this time to widow, Sophia Sehrens, whose husband and father to her four children had been killed by Native Indians. This brush with violence on the frontier was not deterrent enough for Henrich and Sophia who eventually settled in Castell, on the Llano River. Source.
Heinrich "Henry" Hasse Jr. was 24 when he married Fredericka Bickenbach, or Rika, who was also originally from Germany. In 1859, the newlyweds settled in the upper Willow Creek area where, Rika's sister, Lisette, and her husband Ernst Jordan had already established a homestead with a few other German families. Their first home at Willow Creek was likely a hastily built picket house, which was common for German settlers who had few belongings and found both materials and incoming funds to be scarce. Still, in a year, the Hasses had acquired a sizeable acreage and built a log cabin equipped with both a smokehouse and a feed house.
Picket Houses, Explained
Picket houses were the preferred style of shelter among German settlers for their relative ease and inexpensiveness. Not meant to serve as long-term housing, picket houses were crudely built by firmly planting upright wooden posts into a trench dug along the intended perimeter of the structure. The gaps between the posts were filled with whatever suitable materials were on hand, which was often salvaged wood, wood chips, mud, or lime. The roofs were commonly made of canvas and straw. Source.
Anyone living in a picket house was probably in a hurry to finish their permanent shelter come winter—as the wood shrank over time, rain and snow easily entered through the cracks between posts.
Germans During the Civil War
Henry would enjoy his newly built home for only a brief time before the onset of the Civil War when many men in the area were enlisted in the Texas Cavalry. Though like Fritz Hoerster, the Hasses and other German men in the Willow Creek Settlement were likely pro-abolition, strained relations between German Americans and Anglo Texans meant that siding with the North would invite almost certain death. It's not a stretch to assume that Henry and many of Mason's original German founders joined the Mason County Minute Men in 1861 under duress.
In the recollections of Texas frontier woman, Mathilda Wagner, she recalls the tension that often boiled over as a result of disagreements over secession and slavery:
"I remember how the people who sympathized with the North during the Civil War had to hide out and sleep in the bushes at night to prevent being killed. There were those who were bitter against Northern sympathizers. There were a large majority of Germans around Fredericksburg who felt the cause of the North was the right cause. A band of men, mostly hard, bad characters, called guerillas, murdered many people."
Texas Tears and Texas Sunshine: Voices of Frontier Women, 1985.
Hard Times for Those Left Behind
When Henry left during the Civil War, Fredericka remained at home with their three small children. If getting supplies was difficult before the war, often requiring the long wagon trip to Fredericksburg, during the war, it was near impossible. Food was so dangerously scarce that when army supply wagons passed on their way to Fort Mason, Rika would scour the ground after them collecting any corn the horses had left behind. She'd gather it, wash it, grind it, and feed it to her children. Instead of coffee beans, Germans made do with parched rye, wheat, or corn, and for soap, they'd use rendered hog fat.
After the War
After the Civil War ended and the Hasses once again had a ready market for their cattle, they quickly became prosperous enough to acquire more than 1500 additional acres of land. In 1883, they contracted a German stonemason to construct the two-story house that stands here today.
The Hasse Legacy
The Hasse house has remained in the family since its construction in the 19th century. Henry's son, John, became owner in 1917 upon the death of his father that same year. Like his father, John Hasse was also a rancher who drove cattle and hogs to Brady, where they were loaded on trains bound for the Fort Worth and Kansas markets.
Eventually, John's daughter and Heinrich's granddaughter, Laverne Lee, would become the heir to the Hasse property. Laverne was an active community member in Mason, who was instrumental in the establishment of the Mason Memorial Hospital and the development of Mason's "Country Lanes" wildflower tours. Laverne took special pride in caring for the Hasse house and making its charms known to others. She was impressed by the hospitality she experienced staying in European bed and breakfasts during her travels in the 1970s and wanted to recreate that experience for visitors to her Texas community. When she finally opened the Hasse house to overnight guests in the early 1980s, it was the first bed and breakfast in Mason County. In a 1995 interview, Lavern was quoted: "I just love the house and always want it to bring happiness and peace to those that stay here. To have heard the stories of my family's good times and tough times endears it to my heart."