National Register Listing

Comal Hotel and Klein-Kuse House

a.k.a. Prince Solms Inn;Eggeling Hotel

295 E. San Antonio and 165 Market St., New Braunfels, TX

Two buildings sited together on a single lot in the German community of New Braunfels, in central Texas, help document the town's residential and commercial architecture as well as certain prevalent socioeconomic patterns. The properties are the Comal Hotel (Prince Solms Inn) of 1900-1901, a good example of the town's commercial hotel architecture from the late Victorian era, and the Klein-Kuse House of ca. 1850-1852, a representative example of Settlement Architecture in New Braunfels, associated with its German pioneers. Here nominated together, the two properties can best be viewed as parts of a whole because of a variety of close relationships. They were owned by one German familial group-the Kuses and Eggelings--for almost a century, and together reflect the efforts of that social unit to sustain itself economically. In addition, both of the structures bear a locational linkage, since one (the house) was moved to accommodate the other (the hotel); the buildings also served complementary commercial functions in the family's primary vocational endeavor: the owner-managers lived in the house while running the nearby hotel. Because of their long-term ownership by the linked families of Wilhelm Kuse and Emilie Kuse Eggeling, the two structures embody certain traditional patterns found among Texas Germans of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Using the extended family as a social and economic system, the Kuse-Eggeling unit became prosperous German burghers in their small ethnic community. The properties are also interesting for their reflection of the entrepreneurial skills of Emilie Eggeling (1851-1930), who was the mainstay of her family during the 1895-1930 period.

Local significance of the building:
Listed in National Register of Historic Places in 1986.