The Austin Chronicle

Rock the Boat

by Karen Olsson

This 32-ton rock has provoked public debate over whether it stands as a monument to atheism in Comfort.
photo by E.R.N. Reed

A 15-foot-tall slab of sand-colored limestone arrived in the Hill Country town of Comfort last July, following an arduous journey. A retired government employee and amateur historian named Ed Scharf had spent months searching Central Texas quarries and stream beds for just the right piece of limestone before spotting this particular one at a quarry in his hometown of Helotes, a suburb of San Antonio. It took two earthmovers several hours to extract it from the 130-foot-deep quarry pit. There at the quarry, retiree Scharf and a couple of hired men toiled for a week with a jackhammer, drills, and chisels, in the middle of one of the hottest Texas summers on record, to smooth the bottom and remove an irregularity. Finally Scharf hired a crane and truck to haul the 32-ton rock to Comfort's small town park.

Since then it's raised a lot of fuss, for a rock -- provoking public debate, media attention, a heated late-night chamber of commerce meeting, and a petition delivered to the Kendall County Commissioners' Court, with 650 signatures beneath the demand, "No Monument to Atheism in Comfort."

The rock's transformation from quarry stone to atheist monument began two years ago, when the Comfort Heritage Foundation, a local historical group, rededicated the town's Treue der Union monument. That monument commemorates a group of 19th-century immigrants who, as the marker beside the monument recounts, opposed slavery, remained loyal to the Union during the Civil War, and ultimately were killed by Confederate soldiers at the 1862 Battle of the Nueces. What the marker doesn't fully explain is that the settlers' opposition to slavery grew out of a curious transposition of Enlightenment idealism to the Western frontier. Many of the Germans who settled the area were "Freidenkers," or Freethinkers: intellectuals who had emigrated with utopian dreams or fled after the failed 1848 Revolution in Germany.

Around the time of the rededication ceremony, it occurred to Scharf to erect a second monument in Comfort, commemorating the Freethinker settlers. "It began with, 'Why isn't there a monument to these people?'" says Scharf, who works part-time as a realtor in Helotes. So with the blessing of the Comfort Chamber of Commerce (the closest thing there is to a governing body in the 1,500-person unincorporated town) and the Comfort Heritage Foundation, Scharf studied up on the Freethinkers and submitted an application to the Texas Historical Commission for an official sign. "The inscription was read publicly, it was sent through the mails, there was never a whisper of dissent," he says. Meanwhile, after contemplating many possible monument designs, Scharf began his search for "a natural rock that everybody could relate to."

For most of August, the unfinished Freethinker cenotaph -- so called to distinguish it from the already existing monument -- sat in the park awaiting the plaque and bronze eagle that were to be attached to it. But late that month an article in the San Antonio Express-News about a current-day freethinker group alarmed a couple of Comfort residents. It implied, at least to some, that the cenotaph-to-be was the brainchild of the Texas Hill Country Freethinkers, a social group made up of agnostics, atheists, and other non-churchgoers. Reporter Zeke MacCormack wrote that THCF members "decided a separate remembrance was merited after hearing prayers said at rededication ceremonies for the restored [Treue der Union] monument in 1996. 'There was no mention of their free thought, that they were nonbelievers in God,' recalled [THCF member Catherine] Fahringer, 'so we decided it's time to come out of the closet and say who we are and honor the freethinkers who went before us.'"

That was enough to spook Roy Perkins and Frank Manitzas, who both live in Comfort and attend the Episcopal church there. They began looking into just who was backing the cenotaph project, obtaining a list of donors that included names of out-of-town residents and atheist organizations. They also read issues of the Texas Atheist, an electronic newsletter published by Howard Thompson of Georgetown, which mentioned plans to stage a "Freethought-Atheist Volksmarch."

March plans were later canceled, as Thompson alerted his readers by reprinting an e-mail from Scharf in the September edition of the atheist newsletter: "After conferring with the minuscule number of Freethinkers in Comfort," Scharf wrote, "I have come to the perhaps unpopular decision to cancel the parade. ... Remember! This is a small town with a lot more religious zealots than Freethinkers." (Scharf now maintains that this was a private, tongue-in-cheek e-mail to Thompson that never should have been printed in the newsletter. Thompson says the e-mail was addressed to multiple recipients, and that Scharf had never objected to Thompson's printing previous e-mails in the newsletter.)

March or no march, Manitzas and Perkins bought ad space in the Comfort News and the Kerrville Daily Times to oppose the cenotaph. "We recently learned that the group sponsoring the monument had a hidden agenda, and that their real purpose was to erect a monument not to our forefathers, but a monument to atheism," they wrote. (The bold is emphatically theirs.) The cenotaph opponents also submitted a petition with 650 signatures on it to the Kendall County Commissioner's Court, which leases the Comfort park to the Comfort Chamber of Commerce, to have the rock removed.

Atheist or Agnostic?

Roy Perkins is a 55-year-old Comfort native and a descendant of Peter Ingenhuett, a town founder who built various businesses and homes in town, later dividing the property among his sons. Perkins, who retired after working more than 30 years for the Comptroller's office, dresses neatly and wears a large-faced watch. His heavy-lidded blue eyes veer in slightly different directions; his voice is exceedingly deliberate. He owns one of the original Ingenhuett houses, where his grandmother lived until she died, and he keeps it as it was in his grandmother's time, right down to the 1936 refrigerator and ancestral tea towels. The museum-perfect house looks uninhabited, but Perkins assures me he lives there -- though he keeps the blinds drawn so as not to invite tourists, he says. (This was later disputed by another person in town, who swore that he lives elsewhere, with his mother.) Behind the 135-year-old house is a small chapel, which Perkins recently restored, installing six pews and a stained-glass window.

Inside the main house, he pulls a 19th-century Lutheran Bible, written in German, from one of the shelves. "This was brought over from Germany in 1817," he said, opening the Bible to point out the family names inscribed there, "and one of the [other] things I have is a confirmation certificate dated the 19th of August, 1849, for my great great great grandmother, Antoni Kapp." Another book in his possession explains that Prince Karl of Solms-Braunfels, one of the founders of New Braunfels, wrote to church officials requesting that a minister be sent to the region. "So you can't say that the folks that settled the region were all atheists. ... This [cenotaph] was funded by modern freethinkers, and the connotation today, that freethinkers are agnostic, I don't believe is correct. They had a belief in a higher being. ... What the people are doing, that have contributed to this project, is distorting the true history."

Naturally, this is disputed by the supporters of the project, one of whom can be found right around the corner from Perkins' grandmother's house, in Ingenhuett's original store. It remains a general store to this day, owned and operated by Greg Krauter, another descendant. Krauter is Perkins' cousin, as well as a past chairman of the Comfort Heritage Foundation. He's been in Comfort all his life, save for the years 1969-1978 when he lived in Austin, majoring in philosophy at UT and later working for the Lower Colorado River Authority. He has longish hair and tinted eyeglasses; he wears a silver ring with a Navajo design on it, but no watch.

"I'm one of a few locals, amateur historians, who've been involved [in the cenotaph project] from the beginning," he said, sitting on a bench outside the store. "Mr. Scharf contacted us several months before the Treue der Union rededication with the idea. We thought it was a good idea. I've also considered myself a Freethinker. I'm descended from Freethinkers."

By calling himself a Freethinker, he says, "basically it means I prefer to use reason and an open mind to come to conclusions." The 19th-century settlers, he says, "weren't active churchgoers. I'm not saying they were atheists." Krauter suspects his cousin's opposition to the project may have stemmed from "some problems we've had in the past couple years. He found out I was involved, that may be part of the reason for his opposition. Of course that's just speculation. But there's got to be some other reason. They've completely ignored the facts. ... No one takes one person's entries on the Internet and draws these kinds of general conclusions." Though Perkins officially belongs to the Heritage Foundation, Krauter said he is not an active member, and may be jealous of that organization's success in restoring the Treue der Union monument and involving community members.

Perkins is president of the Comfort Historical Society, a smaller group that operates the Comfort museum. The museum is rarely open.

Rock Must Go

After receiving the anti-atheist petition, the Kendall County Commissioner's Court decided it would prefer to let the town resolve the issue on its own, according to County Judge James Gooden. So on Sept. 24, the Comfort Chamber of Commerce, after a crowded, three-hour comment session, voted to remove the existing rock and appointed a committee to determine what will replace it. According to Pam Duke, a member of the chamber and editor of the Comfort News, the chamber's action resulted from a general sentiment that the rock, which is almost twice as large as what Scharf originally proposed, did not suit the park. (Scharf, who says the rock looked a lot smaller when it was at the bottom of the quarry, had offered to trim it down to the anticipated size.) "To us it was not aesthetically pleasing," says Duke. "That was the main problem."

"We're not bigoted; we don't care if atheists come to this community," says Duke. The issue has been blown out of proportion in news reports, she says. "All the to-do in the press, most people think it's outrageous. We've always been live and let live." And, she adds, buy and let buy: Comfort is one of a cluster of Hill Country towns that have been cashing in on its history over the past decade. The town's newest settlers are a half-dozen antique shops, whose proprietors don't exactly appreciate the kind of publicity the cenotaph controversy has brought Comfort. ("No, uh-uh, I don't have anything to say about that," one of them told me. "That's just a few people with nothing better to do.") Meanwhile, the rock has remained in the park. Apparently it's a lot easier to vote to remove a 36-ton object than to actually get rid of it.

Karen Olsson is an associate editor with The Texas Observer, where this story first appeared.
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