Immanuel Baptist Church

The name Immanuel came from the pressures of two world wars. Services, weddings and funerals were first held in German, and around 1917 a local account says federal agents urged the church to switch to English, which it did. During World War II the congregation took the name Immanuel Baptist to shield itself from anti-German feeling. Membership peaked at 112 in 1940 and fell to 46 by 1967. The sanctuary burned in 1939 and was rebuilt in local stone in 1941. A Hispanic Baptist ministry began meeting here in 2009 and joined the church the next year.

What the plaque says

Immanuel Baptist Church Christian Siebenhausen and Karl Wiegand migrated to Kyle from germany in 1883. Other German families soon joined them. In 1886, sixteen of these settlers met at the George Wiegand home to form the first German Baptist Church of Kyle. Services were originally held in homes and Sunday School at the community schoolhouse. A church building and parsonage were erected in 1893 on land acquired from Frank Marstellar. Fire destroyed the first church in 1940. The present rock structure was dedicated in 1941, when the fellowship became Immanuel Baptist Church. (1977)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Spring Lake and the Meadows Center — 7.0 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.
• Lockhart Courthouse Square — 10 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.
• McKinney Falls State Park — 18 mi
  Limestone falls on Onion Creek inside Austin, where people camped under a rock overhang for thousands of years and a financier of the Texas Revolution built his stone ranch house.
• Gruene Historic District — 22 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

• Beef for the Confederacy — 3.2 mi
• Kyle — 4.4 mi
• John Wheeler Bunton — 4.4 mi
• Kyle Cemetery — 4.5 mi