Episcopal Church of the Annunciation

The bishop who held that railway-car service was Robert W. B. Elliott, born at Beaufort, South Carolina, in 1840. After graduating from South Carolina College in 1861 he joined the Confederate army, served as aide to Gen. A. R. Lawton, was wounded at Second Manassas and was with Joseph E. Johnston at the surrender in 1865. Ordained in 1868, he was rector of St. Philip's in Atlanta when he was chosen missionary bishop of Western Texas. He found six church buildings in his district and left twenty-four, nine rectories, St. Mary's Hall and Montgomery Institute.

What the plaque says

Episcopal Church of the Annunciation Luling's first church building. The Rt. Rev. Robert W. B. Elliott (1840-87), first bishop, missionary district of western Texas, enroute to his see city, held his original service in the district in a Galveston, Harrisburg & San Antonio Railway passenger car in Luling on Dec. 20, 1874, eight months after town's founding. Early in 1875, the Rev. Wallace Carnahan preached here. The rev. Nelson Ayres arrived as vicar in Feb. 1876 and began to build this chapel with his own hands, conducting first service in it on April 15, 1877. Church was remodeled in 1938 and 1965. (1974)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lockhart Courthouse Square — 14 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.
• Spring Lake and the Meadows Center — 22 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.
• Gruene Historic District — 27 mi
  A cotton town on the Guadalupe that the boll weevil emptied, rescued in the 1970s by a kayaking architecture student, with a dance hall that says it has never closed.

More markers nearby

• City of Luling — 0.2 mi
• Edgar B. Davis, Oil Pioneer-Philanthropist — 0.4 mi
• Rosenwald School — 0.6 mi
• Zedler's Mills — 0.8 mi