Muenster

The colonists came by letter. The Handbook of Texas says the Flusche brothers, land agents, wrote to German Catholic settlements they had started in Iowa and Kansas and advertised in Midwestern German-language papers. By December 8, 1889 the town held twenty-five men, seven women and six children, and a school went up that spring for $1,000. The first church, begun in 1891, was destroyed by a December storm before services; the second fell to a tornado on July 31, 1893; a brick third church served until 1952. The Katy's branch line, built in 1887, ran until 1969.

What the plaque says

Muenster In 1889 brothers Anton, August, and Emil Flusche contracted to sell 22,000 acres of this land along the Missouri, Kansas & Texas Railroad. Jot Gunter gave 25 acres for a school, church, cemetery, and park. The first Mass, celebrated Dec. 8, 1889, marked the official beginning of this German Catholic town. Despite drought, typhoid fever, and tornadoes destroying the first two church buildings, the area grew and farming and dairy business increased. Farmers established an insurance company and a marketing group for buying products in bulk. An oil boom in 1926 added to the prosperity. (1979)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Stonewall Saloon Museum — 8.8 mi
  Saint Jo's first permanent building, a stone saloon of 1873 with rooms upstairs for trail drovers, in a town named, the story goes, as a joke on a founder who did not drink.
• Great Hanging Memorial — 14 mi
  Two granite monuments in a Gainesville park, dedicated in 2014, for the Cooke County men the Confederate militia hanged in October 1862 on suspicion of Unionism.

More markers nearby

• First Cooke County Surveyor Daniel Montague (1798-1876) — 5.9 mi
• Town of Saint Jo — 8.6 mi
• Era, The Town of — 12 mi
• Hubert H. Moss — 13 mi