Caspar Braun

When word of the "orphaned condition" of German Protestants in Texas reached C. F. Spittler, director of the Pilger Mission von St. Chrischona in Basel, he sent Theobald G. Kleis and Christoph A. Sager from his training school in 1850 and six ordained Lutheran ministers the next year. Five of them, with Braun as chairman, organized the First Evangelical Lutheran Synod of Texas in Houston in November 1851. The Swiss school kept sending help until at least eighty-five pastors had come from it by 1896, and in 1853 the Texas Synod joined the Lutheran General Synod.

What the plaque says

Caspar Braun (March 16, 1822 - October 14, 1880) 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 Huston 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. (1989)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sam Houston Park and the Heritage Society — 1.0 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.
• Rothko Chapel — 2.1 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.
• The Menil Collection — 2.2 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.
• Buffalo Soldiers National Museum — 2.2 mi
  A museum in Houston's 1925 Light Guard Armory that tells the service of Black soldiers from the Revolutionary War onward, built from one veteran's thirty years of collecting.

More markers nearby

• Irvin Capers Lord — steps away
• Edwin Fairfax Gray — steps away
• Brown Chapel A. M. E. Church — 0.4 mi
• John Kirby Allen — 0.7 mi