About this tour
The double-P name gives it away: Pflugerville was founded by Germans. In the 1850s Henry Pfluger, a Prussian immigrant, brought his family to this stretch of blackland prairie north of Austin and began farming, and other German families followed. A community grew up around the Pfluger holdings — a Lutheran church, a school, cotton gins, and general stores — that took the family's name. For a century it stayed a quiet German farming town on the cotton prairie; only recently did Austin's suburban tide wash over it. This short drive links the markers that tell that founding story: the town's origin, the settlers' Lutheran church, an early German farmhouse, the schools, and the Black congregation that was also part of the prairie community.