Joseph V. Frnka

The plaque's line about Germany has a fuller version in the House memorial of 1959. It says Frnka sat as a judge for the United States in Munich from 1946 to 1948 in war crimes work. Born March 7, 1880, to Josef and Anne Frnka, he chaired the House committee on judicial districts in 1925 and served as assistant attorney general under Grover Sellers. He was president of the county bar in 1935 and one of the first Colorado County lawyers admitted to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court. He died in Columbus on January 29, 1958, at 77.

What the plaque says

Joseph V. Frnka Joseph V. Frnka, born in Industry, Texas, built a home here in 1906. A self-taught lawyer, Frnka was admitted to the Texas Bar in 1915. A business leader, he was active in the local Masonic Lodge and helped found the Columbus Lions club. In 1923-1927 he represented this area in the Texas House of Representatives. He practiced law locally and in 1945 was appointed assistant state attorney general. Following World War II he served as a prosecutor and judge with the U.S. military government in Germany. Frnka later served as chief title examiner of the Veterans Land Board in Austin. (1994)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Stafford Opera House — steps away
  A cattleman's bank and theater of 1886 on the Columbus square, in a river town Sam Houston burned in 1836 and a county marked by a long feud and a 1935 lynching.
• Attwater Prairie Chicken National Wildlife Refuge — 16 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.
• Saints Cyril and Methodius Catholic Church (Dubina) — 18 mi
  The church of Texas's first Czech settlement, under a sky-blue painted ceiling that was whitewashed in the 1950s and brought back from faint traces by its own parishioners.
• St. John the Baptist Catholic Church (Ammannsville) — 20 mi
  A wooden Carpenter Gothic church built in 1919 after storm and fire took two before it, its dusty-rose interior painted by an artist whose name was lost for decades.

More markers nearby

• The Columbus Tap Railway — steps away
• Columbus Oak — steps away
• Stage Lines Through Columbus — steps away
• Joseph Jefferson Mansfield — steps away