Llano, Texas

Families of foxes and armadillos sometimes dart across Patty Schneider Pfister’s backyard. Llano, Texas—population 3,232—is not quite the frontier wilderness German immigrants faced when they first settled in the region beginning in 1847. Patty lives five blocks from Llano’s Courthouse Square, where the identities of some cattle thieves rampant in the region’s Hoo Doo War got extinguished in flames when the courthouse burned down in 1892. The Germans, encouraged by the Adelsver