St. Barbara's Catholic Church

The company owned the church and paid the priests. A Tarleton library account, drawing on a 1994 paper, says the Texas and Pacific Coal Company charged no rent and paid the priests' salaries, parsonage rent, board and a livery stable, without apparent interference in church affairs. The first of about 2,500 baptisms came in January 1893, and one priest was said to hear confession in six languages. The Sisters of the Incarnate Word opened Hunter Academy in 1894, with night English classes for the foreign born. In 1937 the building was cut in half and moved to Mingus.

What the plaque says

St. Barbara's Catholic Church Most of Thurber's immigrant population, representing eighteen nationalities, were Catholic. Missionary priests ministered to the town until 1892, when the coal company erected a Catholic church at the bottom of graveyard hill. Originally named St. Thuribus, it was renamed St. Barbara's to honor the patroness saint of miners. A church school, Hunter Academy, operated from 1894 to 1923. The church building was moved two miles north to Mingus when Thurber was dismantled in the 1930s, and was returned to Thurber in 1993 by Thurber preservationists. (1995)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Old Rip at the Eastland County Courthouse — 25 mi
  A horned lizard in a glass-topped casket in the 1928 Eastland courthouse, the creature said to have come out alive from the old building's cornerstone after thirty-one years.
• Lake Mineral Wells State Park and Trailway — 30 mi
  A Cross Timbers park on the old Camp Wolters grounds, built around a 1922 water-supply lake for a spa town, with Penitentiary Hollow's rock climbing and a 20-mile trailway.

More markers nearby

• New York Hill — steps away
• Site of Thurber Brick Plant — steps away
• Thurber — 0.2 mi
• Site of Hotel Knox and Thurber Mining Office — 0.2 mi