The brick town — a small Alsatian settlement on US-90 known for its brickworks and the ruins of old St. Dominic's.
D'Hanis is an unincorporated community on Parkers Creek at U.S. Highway 90, eight miles west of Hondo in western Medina County. Population is approximately 785. Elevation is roughly 950 feet. The community is sometimes called New D'Hanis to distinguish it from the site of Old D'Hanis, the original 1847 Alsatian settlement one mile to the east. The town's identity rests on two things: the brickworks that have operated here for over a century, and the ruins of the original settlement that sit quietly in the brush east of the highway.
D'Hanis is known for its brick, its ruins, and its place in the Alsatian settlement sequence. The D'Hanis Brick and Tile Company has been manufacturing iron-rich clay brick from Seco Creek deposits since 1905, and D'Hanis brick appears in commercial buildings throughout Medina County, Uvalde County, and beyond. The ruins of St. Dominic's Catholic Church (1869) and the old cemetery at the original settlement site are a quiet draw for history visitors. And D'Hanis was the third of Henri Castro's Alsatian colonies — after Castroville (1844) and Quihi (1845) — making it part of the founding sequence of the corridor.
D'Hanis was the third settlement made by Henri Castro through his agent, Theodore Gentilz. In the spring of 1847, twenty-nine Alsatian families established the community as the frontier settlement on the Old San Antonio Road. Castro named the village for William D'Hanis, the Antwerp manager of his colonization company. Jean Batot and his son Christian were the first settlers to arrive. Town lots and twenty-acre farms were surveyed and deeded to the first colonists.
With building materials in short supply, the early settlers built rough shelters of mesquite pickets and thatch, eventually replaced by distinctive European-style rock homes. Catholic services were conducted by priests from Castroville in a small structure built in the middle of the village. The construction of nearby Fort Lincoln in 1849 afforded the settlers employment and protection from Indian raids. By 1850 the settlement comprised twenty dwellings and had a schoolteacher. A post office was established in 1854, and the town became a stage stop on the San Antonio–Rio Grande road.
St. Dominic's Church was built in 1869. For a time in the early 1870s, two nuns of the Sisters of Divine Providence taught school in D'Hanis. By 1881, when the Galveston, Harrisburg and San Antonio Railway built across Medina County, old D'Hanis was the site of two stores, a dance hall, and sulfur-well baths. The railroad bypassed the original settlement, and the new town grew up around the loading depot one and a half miles to the west. Over the next few years the post office, the businesses, and the citizens moved to the railroad site.
The D'Hanis Brick and Tile Company was organized in 1905 by Louis Carle, Sr., F.J. (Joe) Carle, Charles Wallrath, and Richard Wallrath of D'Hanis, along with Gus Birkner, who owned the L&L Brickyard between Luling and Lockhart. The enterprise was built on a superior clay deposit discovered by Charles Wallrath near his home on the banks of Seco Creek, one mile west of D'Hanis. The clay showed high deposits of iron — an excellent binder when fired in kilns. Wallrath was a brick mason by trade in Germany before immigrating to D'Hanis in the early 1870s. He initially made crude sun-dried bricks, then improved his technique with hand-molded bricks fired in mesquite-wood pits.
Originally the plant had five kilns fired by mesquite wood, each with a capacity of 350,000 bricks. The clay was hand-molded and sun-dried before firing, a process that produced a dense, iron-rich brick with a distinctive warm tone ranging from deep red to orange-brown depending on the firing temperature. The plant survived two world wars and the Great Depression. During the early twentieth century, D'Hanis brick was shipped by rail throughout south-central Texas and used in commercial buildings, schools, churches, and residences across Medina, Uvalde, Bexar, and surrounding counties. The brick's durability and visual warmth made it a preferred material for institutional construction.
After more than a century, the D'Hanis Brick and Tile Company remains in operation on the same Seco Creek clay deposit. The plant has modernized its kilns but continues to produce brick from the original source material. A Texas historical marker at the plant entrance on Old Eagle Pass Road (County Highway 429) documents the full history, including the founding families and the geology of the clay deposit.
Holy Cross Church was completed in 1914 to serve the relocated community. It was badly damaged by fire in 1963 but rebuilt the following year. The town installed waterworks in 1955, street lights in 1957, and a sewer system in 1973. D'Hanis has never incorporated.
The community today is small and quiet — a cluster of homes, the church, a school (D'Hanis Independent School District serves the area), and the brickworks. There is no commercial strip, no gas station, and no restaurant within the community itself. The population has fluctuated between 600 and 850 since the mid-twentieth century. What keeps D'Hanis on the map is the brick plant, the school, and the ruins — three things that together tell the story of a frontier Alsatian settlement that relocated to meet the railroad and left its original buildings standing in the brush.
The ruins of St. Dominic's Catholic Church and its cemetery sit at the original 1847 settlement site, east of current D'Hanis, south of US 90, accessible from County Road 5223. The church was built in 1869 of local limestone — hand-cut blocks laid in courses with lime mortar. The walls are thick, the window openings arched, and the proportions modest. When the community relocated to the railroad in the 1880s, the church was abandoned. The roof collapsed at some point in the early twentieth century. What remains today are roofless walls standing to near-full height, the adjacent cemetery with graves dating to the 1850s, and a Texas Historical Commission marker documenting the site.
The cemetery is the older feature — burials predate the church by two decades. Headstones are a mix of hand-carved limestone and later commercial markers, many with German and French inscriptions. The site is quiet, shaded by mesquite and live oak, and largely unvisited except by history researchers and descendants of the original families. The ruins are on private land adjacent to a public road; visitors should respect property boundaries and not cross fences.
Fort Lincoln (1849), established by the U.S. Army to protect the Alsatian settlers from Comanche and Lipan Apache raids, was located approximately one mile south of the settlement. The fort was garrisoned intermittently through the 1850s and abandoned before the Civil War. Its site is marked by a historical marker but largely unexcavated. No standing structures remain.
D'Hanis has no restaurants confirmed operating from primary sources as of this writing. The nearest dining options are in Hondo (8 miles east) and along US 90.
No recurring public events confirmed for D'Hanis from primary sources.
Backroads has properties in the D'Hanis area that are surfaced through the guide system. There is no commercial lodging within the community itself.
D'Hanis matters as the physical link between the Alsatian settlement story and the built environment of the corridor. The brick manufactured here — iron-rich, warm-toned, durable — is the material that Hondo's downtown was built from in the early 1900s. Every D'Hanis brick building in Hondo, Castroville, Uvalde, and San Antonio traces back to this one Seco Creek clay deposit and the families who organized its extraction. The ruins of Old D'Hanis are the most tangible remnant of what the original 1847 frontier settlements looked like before the railroad relocated everything — roofless limestone walls standing in the brush, a cemetery with headstones in German and French, and a historical marker that tells the story plainly. And the brickworks, still operating after more than a century from the same clay deposit, is one of the longest-running industrial operations in the Texas Hill Country. The town is also a case study in what happens when a railroad bypasses a settlement: the old town dies in place, the new town grows at the depot, and both remain visible on the landscape a century and a half later.
Planning a trip to D'Hanis? Ask Emile, the local guide, anything — the old brickworks, the ruins of St. Dominic's, or where to stay. Ask Emile at castroville.ai →