J. H. Meurer Home

Meurer, then of Bastrop, is said to have gone to Galveston to recruit newly arrived Germans for Scotland. Many early settlers came from Central and South Texas. The first train arrived on July 21, 1908, as the Southwestern Railway built west from Henrietta, and that year a post office opened in the first general store. By 1910 Scotland was 'a thriving community' of 600, shipping grain and cotton, and by 1915 it had St. Boniface Church, a Knights of Columbus hall, a bank, a gin and a hotel. The railroad was abandoned by 1920.

What the plaque says

German native John H. Meurer (b. 1850) settled his family in this area about 1900 when he became a land agent for H. J. Scott of the Clark and Plumb Company. In selling over 60,000 acres of land, Meurer helped to establish the towns of Windthorst (6 mi. S) and Scotland (named for H. J. Scott), both primarily German Catholic settlements. Meurer had this one-and-a-half story home built in 1911. The 11-room house with wraparound porch remained in the Meurer family until 1941 when Saint Boniface Catholic Church purchased it to serve as a residence for parish priests. (1982)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lake Arrowhead State Park — 8.5 mi
  A prairie park on the north shore of the Wichita Falls water-supply lake, which drowned the town of Halsell in 1965-66, with mesquite campsites, a lighted pier and more than 200 bird species.
• Royal Theater — 9.8 mi
  Archer City's movie house, burned in 1965, given a false front for The Last Picture Show and brought back by the town in the 1990s as a working stage on Main Street.
• Kell House Museum — 17 mi
  The 1909 Classic Revival house of Frank Kell, the miller and railroad builder who helped make Wichita Falls a city, shown by guided tour with its family furniture still in place.
• World's Littlest Skyscraper — 18 mi
  A four-story brick tower in downtown Wichita Falls, 40 feet tall and 10 feet wide, the leftover of a 1919 oil-boom office deal in which, the story goes, investors misread inches as feet.

More markers nearby

• St. Mary's Catholic Church Windthorst — 5.9 mi
• Archer County Jail — 9.8 mi
• Camp Cureton, C.S.A. — 9.9 mi
• A Jesse James Hideout — 9.9 mi