Old Salem Lutheran Church Site

Rose Hill, known until 1892 as the Spring Creek Community, was first settled before 1836 by P. W. Rose, who sat on Harrisburg County's first grand jury, and German settlement began after Johann Heinrich Theisz arrived from Galveston in 1846 and bought 200 acres. A post office operated there from 1852 to 1905. In the 1880s three general stores, a sawmill, a gristmill, a blacksmith, a wagon maker and seven cotton gins served cotton farmers who shipped from Cypress Top, eight miles south. The settlement reached 300 people in 1915 and fell to twenty in the 1930s.

What the plaque says

Old Salem Lutheran Church Site A number of German immigrants who arrived in Galveston during the 1840s and 1850s settled in the Rosehill community. The families of George Sherer, Henry Theiss, Jacob Theiss, and C. W. Winkler founded Salem Lutheran Church in 1852, with the Rev. Gottlieb Ebinger as their first pastor. They worshipped initially in private homes, then erected a church building at this site on land donated by C. W. Winkler in 1857. The congregation affiliated with the Missouri Synod in 1868. The following year, George Sherer gave his family cemetery, situated about one mile northeast of this location, as a church burial ground. The fellowship established a parochial school about 1870 and later built a schoolhouse on adjacent land given by Henry Theiss. In 1880 a frame edifice with steeple was constructed here to replace the original church. Until the 1930s, men customarily sat on the left side of the church and women on the right, and services were conducted in German. Additions to the cemetery in 1943 and 1954 increased its size to five acres, which members of the congregation tended on cleanup days scheduled twice a year. the old frame church was destroyed by fire in 1964 and replaced by a new edifice, dedicated Feb. 5, 1967. (1978)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sam Houston Park and the Heritage Society — 29 mi
  Ten historic buildings gathered in a downtown park below the skyscrapers, among them the 1870 house of the Reverend Jack Yates, built five years after emancipation.
• The Menil Collection — 29 mi
  John and Dominique de Menil's free museum in Montrose: a grey-sided Renzo Piano building among bungalows, holding antiquities, Surrealism and art of Oceania under natural light.
• Rothko Chapel — 29 mi
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• Buffalo Soldiers National Museum — 30 mi
  A museum in Houston's 1925 Light Guard Armory that tells the service of Black soldiers from the Revolutionary War onward, built from one veteran's thirty years of collecting.

More markers nearby

• The Klein Community — 10 mi
• Saint Paul A. M. E. Church — 17 mi
• Bear Creek Methodist Church and Cemetery — 19 mi
• _H7 Ranch — 22 mi