Historical Marker
St. John Lutheran Church
Bellville, Austin County · Texas
Erected 1996
The hurricane that knocked this church off its foundation in 1900 had been misread. The University of Rhode Island's storm history notes that it crossed Cuba as a tropical storm on September 3, and that Havana forecasters predicted a turn into the Gulf of Mexico while U.S. Weather Bureau men expected it to curve toward the mid-Atlantic. It came ashore near Galveston on September 8 as an estimated Category 4. The Handbook of Texas traces it north into Oklahoma and Kansas, and the National Weather Service says it still carried 70 mph winds to the Great Lakes.
What the plaque says
St. John Lutheran Church This congregation was organized in 1896 by seven Bellville families assisted by the Rev. O. W. Hartmann, a faculty member of the Evangelical Lutheran College in Brenham (1891-1906). Early worship services were held in the Methodist church building. The Lutheran congregation acquired one acre of land for a church at this site and completed a frame building with a steeple in November 1898. The Rev. P. Gogolin was called as the congregation's first full-time minister in 1899, and remained for two years. A hurricane reached Bellville in 1900, completely destroying the German Methodist Church, and blowing the Lutheran church from its foundation. The congregation repaired the damage to the church structure. For several years the church struggled with part time pastors and a small, inactive membership, until the arrival of Pastor Hans Krause in 1911. Under his leadership the Sunday School expanded, the Ladies Aid Society was reactivated, a parsonage was built, and the church membership more than doubled. The congregation grew steadily, building a brick sanctuary in 1925. The church continues to serve the needs of its membership and the community as it has for more than 100 years. (1996)
Where it stands
29.95546, -96.25540 · Directions
Worth the stop nearby
- San Felipe de Austin State Historic Site — 14 miStephen F. Austin's colonial capital on a Brazos bluff, the town of the Consultation and the first Texas newspapers, burned by its own garrison in the Runaway Scrape of 1836.
- Attwater Prairie Chicken National Wildlife Refuge — 20 miTen thousand acres of native coastal prairie northeast of Eagle Lake, kept for a critically endangered grouse, many of whose birds are hatched in captivity and released here.
- Stafford Opera House — 24 miA cattleman's bank and theater of 1886 on the Columbus square, in a river town Sam Houston burned in 1836 and a county marked by a long feud and a 1935 lynching.
- Round Top and Festival Hill — 27 miA German village on the old La Bahía Road, named for a house tower, with an 1867 stone church, a Fourth of July kept since 1851 and a concert hall a pianist built without blueprints.