St. John Lutheran Church

Before it was Coryell City, this was Rainey's Creek. The Handbook of Texas says that was the name when the county was organized in 1854, and a post office of that name opened beside the creek in 1857. By 1860 nearly seventy families lived in the vicinity. The community was called Coryell by the early 1870s, and in the 1880s it had a church, a district school, two steam cotton gins and 200 residents. The population peaked at 406 in 1939 and fell to 150 by 1943. The post office closed in 1958.

What the plaque says

St. John Lutheran Church The area around Coryell City was settled in the 1880s by a number of German immigrant families. Desiring to worship in their native language, a group of settlers began meeting together in homes. The Rev. Johannes Barthel of the Luthern Church occassionally conducted services for the settlers. He was succeeded by the Rev. R. Seils, who officially organized St. John Luthern Church on December 7, 1889, in the Home of Fritz Wiede. The congregation purchased two acres of land and built their first sancturary in 1890. It was replaced by a larger structure in 1908, which served the congregation until it was destroyed by fire in 1921. A new sanctuary built that year was replaced by a red brick structure in 1959. Worship services were periodically conducted in the German language until 1952, despite some ill feeling the practice caused during the years of World War I. Adjacent to the church is the St. John Lutheran Cemetery. Dating to the 1890s, it is the final resting place of many church and community members, including verterans of World War I, World War II, and Vietnam. (1989)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Bosque Museum — 16 mi
  A Clifton museum holding what it calls the largest repository of Norwegian artifacts in the South and Southwest, with Bosque County finds some 10,000 years old and a log cabin built by the Olson family.
• Mother Neff State Park — 17 mi
  A Leon River park that grew from six acres Isabella Neff left the state in her 1921 will, where Civilian Conservation Corps Company 817 built a stone tower, a pavilion and roads in the 1930s.
• Meridian State Park — 24 mi
  A 505-acre park in Bosque County where World War I veterans of a Civilian Conservation Corps company dammed Bee Creek in 1933-34 for a 72-acre lake and cut stone buildings around it.
• Waco Mammoth National Monument — 25 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.

More markers nearby

• Canaan Baptist Church — 1.9 mi
• Prairie Chapel School — 2.6 mi
• Osage Cemetery — 2.9 mi
• Moore, John Creed — 3.0 mi