St. Francis Catholic Church Community

The parish grew around a railroad stop. When the Southern Kansas built from Panhandle to Amarillo in 1908, St. Francis began as a station; G. A. Meyer opened a general store that year with the post office inside, and in March Father David Henry Dunn of Amarillo said Mass in a private home. The community was dedicated in January 1909 and its first church finished that spring. A larger brick church followed in 1926, Franciscan Sisters opened a parochial school in 1933 with some thirty-five students, and when the church burned in February 1936 it was rebuilt by summer.

What the plaque says

St. Francis Catholic Church Community Attracted by the colonization efforts of Illinois residents Dr. Guy Clifford Powell and The Rev. Francis J. O'Reilly, German Catholic settlers began moving here in 1907. The pioneers formed the nucleus of the St. Francis Parish. Plans for a town failed, but a strong rural and agricultural community developed with the church as the spiritual, cultural and social center. Once the site of a railroad depot and a school, the St. Francis Catholic Church Community has retained its identity and has continued to reflect its pioneer heritage despite nearby urban growth. (1983) Supplemental: St. Francis Church commemorates a century of Eucharistic celebrations growing in love of God, family, land and country as a strong faith community-March 13, 2008.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Route 66 Sixth Street Historic District — 14 mi
  Thirteen blocks of Amarillo's streetcar suburb that Route 66 turned into a roadside strip, from the 1922 Nat to Texaco, Phillips and Dutch Mill stations, now shops and bars.
• Carson County Square House Museum — 15 mi
  The 1880s ranch cottage that is the oldest house in the town of Panhandle, at the heart of a twenty-one-building museum of the plains from mammoth hunters to the oil boom.
• Helium Centennial Time Columns Monument — 17 mi
  Four sealed time capsules raised in Amarillo in 1968 for helium's centennial, in the city that for years produced almost all the world's commercial helium from the Cliffside field.
• Gem Theatre — 18 mi
  Claude's small-town movie house of 1915, restored by the Armstrong County Museum and remembered for the scene in Hud where Homer and Lonnie Bannon sing along to Clementine.

More markers nearby

• Fort Smith-Santa Fe Trail, Gregg Route, 1840 — 6.0 mi
• Town of Washburn — 6.7 mi
• First Tree Texas High Plains — 9.9 mi
• Amarillo Tri-State Fair — 10 mi