Blue Mound

Blue Mound, a scattered rural community on Interstate Highway 35 six miles northwest of Denton in Denton County, was founded by German-speaking people in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The site was originally called Indian Mound but was renamed Blue Mound for the local blue prairie flowers. In 1876 Herman Christian Barthold, Sr., and his family traveled by covered wagon from Springfield, Illinois, to begin the settlement. Later, many more Germans journeyed through the Midwest to Blue Mound, while still others immigrated to the community directly from Germany, most of them through the agency of John B. Schmitz. Community residents established a school, a German Baptist church, and a German Methodist church. In the early 1900s a Lutheran church in nearby Krum also served Blue Mound residents. Blue Mound's Methodist church, which conducted worship services in German until 1938, has survived since the 1890s. The Blue Mound community furnished the native limestone for the outer walls of the Denton County Courthouse, constructed in 1896. Although in the 1980s perhaps three-fourths of the residents in the Blue Mound area were descendants of the original German community, only limited aspects of German culture survived there. During the 1980s the former school building was still used as a community center.