A native of Germany, Caspar Braun was educated in Switzerland. A physician and teacher as well as a Lutheran clergyman, he was sent to Pennsylvania as a missionary in 1847. He arrived in Houston in 1850. The following year he organized the first German Evangelical Lutheran Church and was elected first president of the German Evangelical Lutheran Synod of Texas. Braun and his wife Margaret (Bohmert) were the parents of eight children.