Texas Venue Directory
Anhalt Hall
Historic community dance hall · Spring Branch
Historic community hall used for dances, gatherings, festivals, and private events.
About this room
Anhalt Hall was not built to be a dance hall. It was built by a posse. German farmers around Anhalt organized the Germania Farmer Verein in 1875 to stop cattle rustling, branding stock with a shared association brand and alerting each other when animals went missing. The group took a state charter in February 1876, then put up a 26-by-34-foot meeting room in 1879. The anti-rustling club grew into a mutual-aid society paying death benefits to members' families, and the meeting room kept growing to hold the parties. It is now one of the largest dance halls in Texas, listed on the National Register in 2018, and the Verein still runs it.
History sources checked August 29, 2026.
Things you may not know
- The original 1879 hall is now the ladies' restroom. The first room the Verein built survives inside the current structure as the old office and the women's restroom. Source
- A carpenter named Franz Erben built that first room for $344. The 1887 expansion, sixty more feet of hall, cost $666. Source
- Oktoberfest at Anhalt has run since 1877, two years before there was a building to hold it in. The traditional meal is pot roast, peas, potato salad, and sauerkraut. Source
- In 1920 the Verein sent relief money to Germany and Austria. A cattle-theft prevention club in rural Comal County was wiring war relief overseas forty-five years after it was founded. Source
- The roof has a chicken-coop vent, and the exterior is pressed tin stamped to look like granite blocks, a poor-man's masonry finish on a barn. Source
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