Immaculate Conception Catholic Church

The Oblates who founded this parish in October 1911 belonged to a young province on the move. Their Second United States Province, later the Southern Province, was formed in 1903 under Father Henri Constantineau, and by January 1911 it had eighty-five men and had spread from the Rio Grande to Dallas, Houston, the Hill Country, Big Spring and Midland. That month seven Oblates in Roman collars and broad-brimmed hats posed on horseback at a church blessing for a visiting Extension Society officer. The magazine titled the photograph the Cavalry of Christ, and the name stuck.

What the plaque says

Immaculate Conception Catholic Church In October 1911, the Oblates of Mary Immaculate established their Roman Catholic society's first parish in Harris County and named it Immaculate Conception. The site chosen was on Harrisburg Boulevard in the incorporated community of Magnolia Park, which was annexed by the city of Houston in 1926. For the parish's first anniversary on October 6, 1912, a three building campus comprising a wood-frame church, rectory, and school and boarding house was dedicated. The school and boarding house were administered by the Sisters of Divine Providence. A consolidated school and auditorium brick building dedicated in September 1936 replaced these facilities, with the school auditorium serving as the church. The 1912 church building was relocated two miles away and converted into a brick building to serve another parish, Queen of Peace, which was originally a mission church of Immaculate Conception. In March 1957, a neo-romanesque style church was dedicated to complement the style of the 1936 school and auditorium. The boarding house ceased operating and in 1969 the school closed permanently. Adhering to their motto as Oblates of Mary Immaculate, the priests of Immaculate Conception ministered to the needy and conducted extensive missionary work in southeast and central Texas. For decades, the priests were assigned the ministry for the state penitentiary system in huntsville. Immaculate Conception was the mother church of the first predominantly hispanic catholic church in Houston, named Our Lady of Guadalupe. At least nine parishes in Harris and surrounding counties can trace their histories to the missionary efforts of Immaculate Conception. Entering its second century of existence, Immaculate Conception continues to be an influential institution in the Magnolia Park Community and beyond. (2011)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Emancipation Park — 4.1 mi
  The Third Ward park that freedpeople bought for Juneteenth in 1872, rebuilt in 2017 on Emancipation Avenue and still the center of the city's June 19 celebration.
• Sam Houston Park and the Heritage Society — 4.9 mi
  Ten historic buildings gathered in a downtown park below the skyscrapers, among them the 1870 house of the Reverend Jack Yates, built five years after emancipation.
• Buffalo Soldiers National Museum — 4.9 mi
  A museum in Houston's 1925 Light Guard Armory that tells the service of Black soldiers from the Revolutionary War onward, built from one veteran's thirty years of collecting.
• Museum of Fine Arts, Houston — 5.7 mi
  The oldest art museum in Texas, grown from a 1900 schoolroom art league into a campus of Watkin, Mies van der Rohe and later buildings, with Ima Hogg's Bayou Bend up the bayou.

More markers nearby

• Lorenzo de Zavala — 0.5 mi
• Magnolia Park — 0.6 mi
• Houston's Deep-Water Port — 1.1 mi
• Thomas H. Ball, Jr. — 1.1 mi