Saint Paul's Church of Gerald

Gerald was named for George Bruce Gerald, a McLennan County judge, and the Handbook of Texas says its post office opened in March 1888 with Joseph D. Morgan as postmaster. By the mid-1890s the community had a gin, two general stores and 300 residents, with farming and cattle raising the main work. When the post office closed in 1904, Gerald had 126 people, and mail was rerouted through West. The Gerald school district merged into West's in 1948. County maps in the 1980s still showed a church and a cemetery.

What the plaque says

Saint Paul's Church of Gerald German farmers began settling in this region in the late 1880s. For many years, they worshiped in the schoolhouse. Gerald post office was opened in 1888. The town had a blacksmith shop, general store, drugstore, and cotton gin by 1900. In that year 16 men organized St. Paul's Evangelical Congregation. Chris Schuetz provided two acres in 1903 for a church that stood on this site until 1937, when the present structure was built. As the International & Great Northern Railroad bypassed Gerald in 1901, a decline soon began. This church still serves a large rural area and marks the former townsite. (1979)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Waco Mammoth National Monument — 11 mi
  A bone bed on the Bosque River where a nursery herd of at least 19 Columbian mammoths was trapped and drowned by floodwater 65,000 to 72,000 years ago, left in place under a dig shelter.
• Waco Suspension Bridge — 12 mi
  A Brazos crossing opened in January 1870 as the longest single-span suspension bridge west of the Mississippi, tolled until 1889, closed to vehicles in 1971 and now walked.
• Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum — 12 mi
  The official state repository of Texas Ranger memorabilia, opened in 1968 in Fort Fisher Park on the Brazos, named for a Ranger post of 1837 whose site no one has located.
• Dr Pepper Museum — 12 mi
  The 1906 bottling plant of the Artesian Manufacturing and Bottling Company, built where Dr Pepper outgrew a Waco drugstore soda fountain, now the Dr Pepper Museum.

More markers nearby

• Ross — 4.8 mi
• Saint Mary's Cemetery — 4.9 mi
• John Silas Edens — 5.5 mi
• West — 6.7 mi