Waelder was laid out in 1875 and 1876 when the Galveston Harrisburg & San Antonio Railroad was built through Gonzales County to serve as a shipping point for the surrounding agricultural and ranching area. Hopkinsville, a thriving community five miles north, moved there and became the nucleus of the town. The G.H.&S.A. named the new town for company attorney Frederick Jacob Waelder because of valuable services he rendered to railroad interests in the early days. Born in Germany, Waelder spent most of his life in Texas, where he was a lawyer, a representative in the state legislature from 1855 to 1859, and briefly an officer in the Confederate Army, and he was also a leader of the German-Texas colonists in numerous undertakings. By 1900, Waelder had grown to be the second largest town in the county, and the history of its populace reaches back to the three waves of German immigrants who settled in Texas from 1831 to 1900. Highly regarded by their neighbors as frugal and industrious, German citizens, together with Latin-Americans and Old South Anglo-Americans, the two other largest ethnic groups in Texas, left a distinctive mark on the culture of the state.