The aged buildings may not look as they did 100 years ago and some have been moved from their initial locations, but much of the original Wunderlich Farms still remains in Klein, offering a glimpse into the history of the family and the community.

A 24-year-old Peter Wunderlich arrived in Texas in 1852 on a boat from Prussia, said Steve Baird, district historian for the Klein, Texas Historical Foundation. Baird said Wunderlich left the small village of Weide—now in central Germany—with hopes to purchase land in Texas.

"Land was really expensive in Germany, and there was a war going on," Baird said. "You had to be an aristocrat to own trees."

That same year, Wunderlich married Katharina Hofius, one of two sisters who had come from Prussia on the same boat as Wunderlich, Baird said. After saving money for two years, the couple bought about 120 acres from Jacob Theiss, another Klein area settler, for $175 and a horse for $45.

The land stretched from the current Wunderlich Farms location north to Spring Cypress Road, Baird said. The settler farmed cabbages, cotton, sweet potatoes, corn and other crops.

"Corn was the most important crop back then," he said.

Wunderlich expanded his property to 577 acres in 1861, acquiring land near the present intersection of Stuebner Airline Road and Spring Cypress, according to documents provided by the Klein, Texas Historical Foundation. The Wunderlichs had six children, including William and Peter II, who each received half of the land after Peter Wunderlich's death in 1863 in a gunpowder mill explosion.

The southern portion of the farm where the remaining 19 acres rests went to Peter II, who was born two months after his father's death. He constructed a farmhouse in 1891, which still stands today along with the chicken house, smokehouse and barn.

Baird said Katharina's home, built by her son, has also been moved south to the 19-acre site. In the 1960s, the land passed to Peter II's son Alphonso, who was a truck farmer and owned chickens on the property. It was sold to the historical foundation in 1995.

Aside from several historical buildings from the area, Baird said the land also houses the Klein, Texas Museum, which features more than 200,000 artifacts of the founding families of the Klein area, including photos, documents, letters, farm equipment, dishes, tools and trinkets.

He said all fourth grade students at Klein ISD make a field trip to the site once a year, and they host other events, such as a monthly farmers market and old-fashioned Christmas events.

"We take you back to the 1920s," Baird said. "It has to be a living history. We approach it as a first person [perspective], and we don't break character."

Although Wunderlich Farms and the Klein, Texas Historical Foundation provide a look back to several of the founding families in the Klein area, Peter Wunderlich also laid the foundation for a family that still resides in the Klein area today, Baird said.

"There's not a place around here you can drive through that wasn't owned by one of those [founding] families," Baird said. "The Wunderlichs and the other families were fundamental to the founding of this area."