Holy Cross Catholic Parish

East Bernard is named for a riverbank it left behind. Jethro Spivi built the first house about 1850 on the east side of the San Bernard, where the name began. The Buffalo Bayou, Brazos and Colorado Railway arrived in 1859, and its Bernard Station moved by 1869 to the west bank, where Main Street grew around it. The Handbook of Texas says the main influx of German and Slavic immigrants came after the 1880s. In 1893 German Methodists dismantled their church in Content, shipped it by rail and rebuilt it in East Bernard in 1909.

What the plaque says

Holy Cross Catholic Parish Many Catholic Czechoslovakian immigrants settled in the prairies near East Bernard in the 1880s. Visiting priests served their religious needs. In 1900 the settlers began the establishment of a parish by purchasing cemetery property in East Bernard. The first Holy Cross Church, a small frame structure, was built in 1905 by Valentine Kozelsky on two acres of land donated by Jan and Anna Vacek. A rectory was built in 1921 for the first permanent resident pastor, the Rev. Joseph C. Kunc. The Holy Cross Catholic school was organized in 1922. A new church building was constructed in 1925 by R. H. Reese of Eagle Lake. Houston architect M. J. Sullivan designed the Spanish Colonial revival structure. It featured a 70-foot belfry and imported Czechoslovakian adornments including statues, painted copper wall hangings, and 10 large, unique stained glass windows of Roundel design. A new school and convent were built in 1928 in the same architectural style. The school operated until 1967. The Pioneer Chapel, a model of the original church, was built in 1994. Holy Cross Catholic Church is now the oldest Catholic church in continuous use in Wharton County. (1997)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Attwater Prairie Chicken National Wildlife Refuge — 15 mi
  Ten thousand acres of native coastal prairie northeast of Eagle Lake, kept for a critically endangered grouse, many of whose birds are hatched in captivity and released here.
• San Felipe de Austin State Historic Site — 19 mi
  Stephen F. Austin's colonial capital on a Brazos bluff, the town of the Consultation and the first Texas newspapers, burned by its own garrison in the Runaway Scrape of 1836.

More markers nearby

• Powell Point School — 4.5 mi
• Krasna Settlement — 4.5 mi
• Guardian Angel Catholic Church — 6.7 mi
• Kendleton — 7.0 mi