First National Bank of Shiner

The bank's national paper shows its size. Organized on November 9, 1900, and chartered ten days later as charter 5628, it issued 82,970 notes worth $668,710. Circulation stood at $12,500 in 1901 and was at or near $40,000 from 1912 through 1934. Resources went from $162,522 in 1903 to $1,322,567 in 1924. Philip Welhausen Sr. was cashier from 1901 to 1908 and Earl Fry from 1909 to 1914, then Peck Welhausen, with Charles Welhausen president through 1917 and Charles B. Welhausen after.

What the plaque says

First National Bank of Shiner In 1891, one year after Shiner was incorporated, Confederate captain and local rancher Charles Welhausen established a private bank for the growing railroad town. Welhausen served as first president, with E. F. Wolters, William D. Green, Earl Fry and Philip Welhausen serving with him on the first board of directors. Federally chartered in 1900, the First National Bank of Shiner has proven to be a strong financial institution and civic leader despite the decline of the cotton market in the early 1900s, a 1925 drought and other economic downturns in the 20th century. The bank remains a significant part of shiner's business history. (2001)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Spoetzl Brewery — 0.4 mi
  The brewery a Czech and German railroad town started in a tin shed in 1909, run through Prohibition by a Bavarian who had brewed in Cairo, and then by his daughter.
• Lavaca County Courthouse — 14 mi
  A limestone Romanesque courthouse of 1897-99 on the square of a town founded by a widow trader, in a county seat that once printed the Socialist Party's state paper.
• Gonzales Memorial Museum — 17 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.
• St. Mary's Church of the Assumption (Praha) — 18 mi
  The mother parish of the Czech settlements around Flatonia, a stone-fronted church of 1895 whose ceiling Gottfried Flury turned into a turquoise garden, with an August 15 feast since 1855.

More markers nearby

• Shiner — steps away
• Captain Charles Welhausen — steps away
• Kaspar Wire Works — 0.6 mi
• Saint Ludmila's Academy — 0.7 mi