Merchant, legislator, and financier of the Texas Revolution, Nicholas Adolphus Sterne was born in Cologne, the eldest child of Emmanuel Sterne and his second wife, Helen. Adolphus was employed in a passport office at age sixteen, in 1817, when he learned that he was to be conscripted. He then forged a passport and set sail for New Orleans, where he found work as a merchant and studied law. For ten years that city would be his base of operations, as he worked as a peddler throughout the south. He joined a Masonic lodge, an affiliation that would later save his life.
In Nashville, on a peddling excursion, Adolphus made the acquaintance of Sam Houston, with whom his fate would be entwined. Sterne moved to Nacogdoches, Texas, in 1826, setting up a mercantile operation, and almost immediately became involved in the Fredonian Rebellion, the first attempt by Anglo settlers to secede from Mexico. Travelling back and forth between Texas and New Orleans, he smuggled guns and other supplies in barrels of coffee. He was arrested by American authorities in Nacogdoches, imprisoned in the Stone House, tried for treason, and sentenced to be shot. But his guards, like him, were Masons, and so eventually they let him go with the promise that he would never take up arms against the government. He didn’t exactly keep this promise: Sterne aided the Texans in the battle of Nacogdoches in 1832 and financed two companies of troops during the Texas Revolution.
During one of his trips to New Orleans Adolphus met his future wife, Eva Catherine Rosine Ruff, an immigrant from Württemberg whose parents had died during a yellow fever epidemic and who had, in turn, been taken in by one of Sterne’s business associates, Placide Bossier. Adolphus and Eva were married in 1828 and made their home on the eastern edge of Nacogdoches, where they would raise their three children. There, too, they hosted Houston when he first moved to Texas, in 1832, and even baptized him a Catholic—as was required by Mexican law—in their parlor. Eva served as his godmother, although Adolphus—who had also officially converted to Catholicism—was busy with the duties marking Yom Kippur.
A strong supporter of Texas independence, Sterne was sent to New Orleans as an agent of the provisional government to raise funds. In 1841, he became a justice of the peace and served as deputy clerk of the board of land commissioners, commissioner of roads and revenues for Nacogdoches County, member of the board of health, and overseer of streets for the corporation of Nacogdoches. He served three terms in the Texas House of Representatives and one in the state senate.
