Church of the Visitation

Westphalia's best-known export is a tune. The Handbook of Texas says Cotton Collins, fiddler for the Lone Star Playboys, composed a waltz with no name in 1946. After a dance, local people suggested calling it the Westphalia Waltz, and the Playboys recorded it first. In 1996 the whole town went onto the National Register of Historic Places as the Westphalia Rural Historic District, honored as a center of rural German Catholic culture. The church, finished in 1895 on a hill, anchors the district, and the Handbook says its twin towers can be seen for miles.

What the plaque says

Church of the Visitation German natives who settled originally in Colorado County came here in 1879 looking for better land. Pleased with the soil and location, they brought their families and immediately purchased 100 acres for a church and school. The earliest Mass was said in 1882 in the home of the first settler, Theodore Rabroker. The original church building, completed in February 1884, was destroyed the following May by a terrible storm. The congregation rebuilt the structure by July. Large numbers of German-American Catholic families moved into the area. Westphalia was named after the province from which the early settlers came. Visiting priests served until 1893 when the Rev. Michael Heintzelmann was assigned as the permanent pastor. He led the congregation for the next 36 years. In 1895, with A. Fuchs of Waco as the designer and contractor, the present church house was completed. The stones were shipped by railroad from Muldoon, Texas, to Lott (8 mi. NE) and then hauled here by wagon. The central church area forms a Latin cross. For safety in storms, six inches of sway was built into the bell towers. The original-design stained glass windows are very rare and priceless. This is one of the largest wooden church buildings in the state. (1978)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Temple Railroad and Heritage Museum — 14 mi
  The Santa Fe depot of 1911 in a railroad town that began in 1880 as a construction camp, now a museum with locomotives and cars parked beside the active rail yard.
• Milam County Courthouse and Jail — 21 mi
  Cameron's 1892 Renaissance Revival courthouse and the 1895 St. Louis-built jail beside it, now the county museum, are listed together on the National Register.
• Mother Neff State Park — 25 mi
  A Leon River park that grew from six acres Isabella Neff left the state in her 1921 will, where Civilian Conservation Corps Company 817 built a stone tower, a pavilion and roads in the 1930s.
• Calvert — 28 mi
  A railroad cotton town of 1868 on State Highway 6 that claimed the largest cotton gin in the world and elected Black men to county and state office during Reconstruction.

More markers nearby

• Westphalia Little School — steps away
• Homesite of Theodore Rabroker — 1.4 mi
• Barclay Cemetery — 3.4 mi
• Farmers Mutual Protective Association of Texas (RVOS) — 3.9 mi