Klein & Cypress: German Pioneers of NW Harris County

Before the subdivisions and the freeways, northwest Harris County was German farm country. In 1848, frustrated by the failure of political reform back home, a young man named Adam Klein sailed from Oberndorf with his bride, and by the 1850s he had settled on the prairie north of Cypress Creek, buying 640 acres for about thirty-three cents apiece. He was not alone: families named Wunderlich, Kleb, Kuehnle, Theiss, Lemm, and Kaiser cleared land, built Lutheran churches, and raised generations who still fill the local cemeteries. When a post office opened in 1884, the community was named Klein in Adam's honor. This drive threads together the markers and burial grounds that hold that German heritage — the community sites, the family cemeteries, the church that anchored their faith — across the twin communities of Klein and nearby Cypress, another old German-settled crossroads on the creek. It is a long, quiet loop through the DNA of a region that outsiders now know only as suburbs.