A Native of Germany: The German-Texan Founding of H and H
On January 11, 1912, the San Antonio Light ran a funeral notice for “William R. Hoffman, tea and coffee merchant of this city.” He was thirty-three. In a few lines it sketched an entire world: a native of Germany who had emigrated with his parents and settled at New Braunfels; a member of the Hermann Sons, the Turner Verein, the Knights and Ladies of Honor, the Knights of Pythias, and the Royal Achates; buried after a service led by Rev. O. Hartmann of St. John’s Lutheran Church. Every line places William R. Hoffmann squarely inside German-Texan San Antonio.
New Braunfels had been founded in 1845 as an Adelsverein colony — the organized vanguard of German immigration into the Texas Hill Country. The Hoffmann family settled there, and a full generation later the roots still held: at his death, Hoffmann’s parents, three brothers, and four sisters all still lived in New Braunfels. He himself had taken the second-generation merchant’s path — New Braunfels, then St. Louis with its large German-American trade, then San Antonio around 1902, where he started a coffee business with a twenty-five-pound hand roaster in a shack behind the Spahn Bakery, soliciting orders by day and roasting green coffee at night.
The lodges were not incidental. The Hermann Sons — Sons of Hermann, the largest German-American fraternal society in Texas, headquartered in San Antonio — and the Turner Verein, the German gymnastic-and-political society, were the connective tissue of German-Texan civic life, the network that linked German merchants across South Texas. The Lutheran funeral at St. John’s, the city’s German-language congregation, was the community’s affair as much as the family’s.
The notice also names his widow: Minnie Menger, daughter of Dr. R. Menger. The founding of H and H is, at root, the joining of two German immigrant families — Hoffmann of New Braunfels and the Menger family of San Antonio — the thread the Menger Connection hub follows forward across five decades of the company.
Hoffmann did not live to see the company that carries his name incorporated. He had built the business by hand over a decade; his death in January 1912 is what triggered its incorporation. On February 6, 1912 — weeks after the funeral — the Hoffmann-Hayman Coffee Company received its charter. The founder’s name went on a door he never opened as an incorporator.
And an older Hoffmann is still waiting to be placed. The Handbook of Texas records a Gustav Hoffmann (1817–1889) among New Braunfels’s founding settlers — a German immigrant who built a malt house and brewery and served as one of the town’s early aldermen. He died in 1889, when William would have been about ten years old. Grandfather? Great-uncle? Unrelated namesake? The record does not yet say. But two Hoffmanns in one small German colony, a generation apart, is exactly the kind of thread this project was built to pull.