Sisterdale is an unincorporated farming and ranching community established in 1847 and located 13 miles (21 km) north of Boerne in Kendall County, in the U.S. state of Texas.

Among the settlers were German pioneers Fritz and Betty Holekamp,[7] geographer Ernst Kapp;[8] Anhalt Premier progeny[9] Baron Ottomar von Behr;[10] journalist Carl Adolph Douai;[11] August Siemering[12] who later founded the San Antonio Express News; author, journalist and diplomat Julius Fröbel; future Wall Street financial wizard Gustav Theissen;[9] and Edgar von Westphalen,[13][14][15] brother to Jenny von Westphalen who was married to Karl Marx.

To honor their memory, Degener along with Eduard Steves and William Heuermann purchased land for the establishment of the German-language Treue der Union Monument, which was built in 1866 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978.

His brother Emil Dresel and partner Jacob Gundlach later established the Rhein Farm Vineyard in Sonoma, California.

[21] Sisterdale eventually had a school house, a gas station-garage, a general store, a cotton gin, and a factory for making cypress shingles.

Those who came were Forty-Eighters, intellectual liberal abolitionists who enjoyed conversing in Latin and believed in utopian ideals that guaranteed basic human rights to all.

[25] Irene Marschall King, granddaughter of John O. Meusebach, remembered how her grandfather enjoyed the intellectual stimulation of visits to Sisterdale,[24] where a man of his aristocratic background could relate to such cultured free thought discourse, and where the air filled with concert music, singing, dancing and an ambience of general Gemütlichkeit.