Saint Peter the Apostle Catholic Church

Laredo's Catholics were divided by language. Bishop Peter Verdaguer built St. Peter's in 1896 for English-speaking Catholics and Our Lady of Guadalupe in 1899 for Spanish speakers. The railroads of the 1880s had made the split, the Handbook of Texas explains: Anglo newcomers outnumbered the few who had come earlier, intermarriage with the old Mexican families declined, and a separate Anglo society grew up beside the original community. Verdaguer's two churches served those two communities.

What the plaque says

Saint Peter the Apostle Catholic Church This congregation, the second Catholic church organized in Laredo, began in 1897 as an English speaking parish to serve non Spanish speaking families who arrived in Laredo during the 1880s. The church structure, designed by German craftsman Heinrich Postcheller, was built in 1897 and has undergone numerous alterations. Nuns of the Ursuline Order established a neighborhood school at St. Peter's about 1899. In 1939 Monsignor Dan Lanning founded the society of Martha Washington, which integrated women into activities of the renowned Washington's birthday celebration. (1993)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• San Agustín Plaza — 0.4 mi
  The shaded square at the center of Laredo's 1755 town, where Carrizo families, Spanish ranchers and a century of border politics shared the same ground.
• Republic of the Rio Grande Museum — 0.4 mi
  A stone-and-adobe Laredo house, by tradition the capitol of a federalist republic that lasted ten months in 1840, now a museum of life in a mid-nineteenth-century home.
• San Agustín Cathedral — 0.4 mi
  Laredo's Gothic Revival parish church, finished in 1872 on a parish older than Texas statehood, and the mother church of the Diocese of Laredo since 2000.
• Fort McIntosh Historic District at Laredo College — 0.7 mi
  An 1849 Army post on the Rio Grande above Laredo, its barracks, officers' quarters and 1895 chapel still standing on a college campus that took over the site in 1947.

More markers nearby

• El Primer Congreso Mexicanista — steps away
• Jovita Idar — steps away
• Jarvis Plaza — steps away
• Laredo's Washington's Birthday Celebration — 0.3 mi