Notre Dame Catholic Church

The parish grew inside a fast-changing Texas church. The Diocese of San Antonio, created in 1874, became an archdiocese in 1926. Railroads, irrigation and the Mexican Revolution after 1910 brought thousands of new Catholics, and by 1930 Texas had about 750,000, five times as many as fifty years before, served by some 630 priests. Ethnic and racial tensions sharpened in the Depression; Archbishop Robert E. Lucey of San Antonio and the Jesuit Carmelo Tranchese answered with social-action policies sympathetic to the New Deal. By 1960 Texas had 1.8 million Catholics.

What the plaque says

Notre Dame Catholic Church Originally organized in 1892 as a mission named St. Mary of the Assumption, it became a parish church in 1911 under Father Henry Michael Kemper. He moved the church to its permanent location soon after and established a school. In 1915, the church sponsored Our Lady of Guadalupe Church and School to serve Hispanic Catholics; they merged with Notre Dame in 1955. When a new church was built in 1935, the name was changed to Notre Dame. A social center was built in 1979 and a larger church building in 1990. Members have reached out to the community through a jail ministry, food pantry, free medical clinic and a host of other volunteer ministries. Today, the church continues to play a vital role in Kerrville. (2010)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Schreiner Mansion — steps away
  The 1879 downtown home of Charles Schreiner, the Alsatian-born merchant, banker and rancher whose store and mohair trade built Kerrville.
• Treue der Union Monument — 14 mi
  An 1866 German-language monument in Comfort over the graves of Hill Country Unionists killed at the Nueces in 1862, its flag of thirty-six stars kept at half-staff.
• Old Tunnel State Park — 19 mi
  A railroad tunnel abandoned in 1942 that now shelters up to three million Mexican free-tailed bats, who fly out each evening from May through October.
• Frontier Times Museum — 22 mi
  A museum built of fossils, petrified wood and cave formations in Bandera, holding a printer-historian's collection of frontier relics and oddities.

More markers nearby

• Christian Dietert Mill — steps away
• Notre Dame Catholic School — steps away
• Kerrville Telephone Company — steps away
• Kerrville Mountain Sun — steps away