Bear Creek Methodist Church and Cemetery

The German settlers homesteaded along Bear, Langham and South Mayde creeks from about 1850, and a one-room school was built in 1876 and a post office in 1878. Next to the church stood the Bear Creek Schuetzen Verein, a shooting club that hosted town meetings, dances, barbecues and German shooting matches, and the club and church together were the heart of the community. Services were in German until World War I. When the first post office burned in 1884, William Schulz moved it into his store and named it for the first postmaster, Henry Addicks.

What the plaque says

Bear Creek Methodist Church and Cemetery German immigrants settled in the area surrounding the junction of Langham and Bear creeks in the 1840s. Settlers traveled to nearby churches for Sunday services until about 1879 when seven charter members established the Bear Creek German Methodist Church. The congregation initially met in members' homes. The church was subsequently made a mission of the Rose Hill Methodist Church near Tomball. In 190 a small church building was erected near the Hillendahl Family Cemetery. The site proved to be poorly drained and often inaccessible, and in 1902 the congregation moved the sanctuary here on three acres donated by Fred and Katherine Brandt. A part of the acreage was laid out as a cemetery. Christine Backen's burial in 1904 was the first recorded here. The cemetery is still active and is maintained by the Addicks Bear Creek Cemetery Association. A summer storm destroyed the sanctuary in 1915 but by the end of that year a new church building had been erected. Area flooding in 1935 resulted in the construction of the nearby Addicks Reservoir in 1940 and the subsequent removal of the church to another site about 1.7 miles south of here. The congregation changed its name to Addicks United Methodist Church in 1968. (1994)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• The Menil Collection — 16 mi
  John and Dominique de Menil's free museum in Montrose: a grey-sided Renzo Piano building among bungalows, holding antiquities, Surrealism and art of Oceania under natural light.
• Rothko Chapel — 16 mi
  An octagonal chapel open to all faiths, built by the de Menils around fourteen dark canvases by Mark Rothko, with Barnett Newman's Broken Obelisk standing in the pool outside.
• Museum of Fine Arts, Houston — 16 mi
  The oldest art museum in Texas, grown from a 1900 schoolroom art league into a campus of Watkin, Mies van der Rohe and later buildings, with Ima Hogg's Bayou Bend up the bayou.
• Sam Houston Park and the Heritage Society — 17 mi
  Ten historic buildings gathered in a downtown park below the skyscrapers, among them the 1870 house of the Reverend Jack Yates, built five years after emancipation.

More markers nearby

• _H7 Ranch — 3.6 mi
• Gray Lodge No. 329, A. F. & A. M. — 5.3 mi
• Dairy (Alief) — 7.7 mi
• The Kinkaid School — 9.2 mi