Clearfork Baptist Church

Clear Fork was a mail stop before it had a post office. A stage from Gonzales carried letters through to the Micenheimer farm, and when a post office finally opened in 1855 with Thomas Burkhead as postmaster, it closed after about a year; residents kept receiving mail until the 1870s. The school first met in the church and later moved to a log cabin with split-log seats and desks, with 51 pupils by 1879. A grist mill on the creek, a cotton gin and a blacksmith followed, and by general acceptance the settlement became known as Brownsboro.

What the plaque says

Clearfork Baptist Church Oldest church in Caldwell County. Organized in 1848, with J. Isaac, pastor. Building erected in 1850; hand-hewn oak frame was morticed with pegs; lumber hauled from Port Lavaca. Land for church and adjoining cemetery was donated in 1857 by John H. Hargis and Thomas L. Burkhead. (1973)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lockhart Courthouse Square — 8.5 mi
  A cotton-era courthouse town named the Barbecue Capital of Texas, built near the 1840 Plum Creek fight that followed the killing of Comanche leaders at peace talks.
• Palmetto State Park — 13 mi
  Dwarf palmettos, bogs and a spring-fed oxbow on the San Marcos River, with CCC stonework from the 1930s, a swamp an hour from Austin and San Antonio.
• Gonzales Memorial Museum — 21 mi
  A 1937 Centennial museum for the Immortal Thirty-two who died at the Alamo, holding the small iron cannon Gonzales calls its Come and Take It gun and the Handbook calls a second one.
• Spring Lake and the Meadows Center — 21 mi
  The headsprings of the San Marcos River, among the longest-inhabited places in North America, once an amusement park with a swimming pig and now seen from glass-bottom boats.

More markers nearby

• Hall Cemetery — 4.0 mi
• McNeil Cemetery — 5.1 mi
• Bethel Primitive Baptist Church — 6.1 mi
• Rosenwald School — 7.4 mi