St. John Lutheran Church

August Hofius, the first Missouri Synod pastor the plaque names, grew up a few miles northeast of here. Brought from Germany as a boy to the Wunderlich family at what is now Klein, he was a nephew of the household's mother, who sent him to the practical seminary in St. Louis. He finished in 1873, served Lutheran families in Colorado County, then tried to build a congregation at Dessau near Austin and met resistance. After Little Cypress he took a call to Nebraska around the start of 1879, served there forty years, and died in the 1919 flu epidemic.

What the plaque says

St. John Lutheran Church Lutheran settlers from Germany moved to this area in 1848. They met in family homes for worship and in 1853 constructed their first church building, which also served as a school. In the 1860s, following the Civil War, they constructed a second building for the church, which at the time was called "the Church in Cypress Settlement." The Rev. Andreas Schmidt became the congregation's first minister in 1872. During that time, church members began a register, listing baptisms, confirmations and weddings, as well as burials in the church cemetery. In 1877, the congregation, then known as "Little Cypress," called the Rev. August Hofius, its first pastor from the Missouri Synod. The congregation wrote, in German script, its first known constitution in 1893 as the "German Evangelical Lutheran St. John's Congregation of the Unaltered Augsburg Confession at Little Cypress and Surrounding Areas." The membership continued to grow, and a new sanctuary was built in 1908. In its tall steeple hung a bell with two clangors, one large and one small. The larger, louder one rang at the beginning and ending of each service. The smaller one was used during services and to communicate to area residents the Sabbath, local events and deaths. The bell and cornerstone from the 1908 church remain with the congregation. During the 1940s, St. John Lutheran Church underwent change and expansion, including the formation of a ladies society and the construction of a new schoolhouse. It also discontinued use of the German language in services and, in 1942, joined the Missouri Synod. During the next several decades, the congregation continued to grow; members worked and served together in butcher clubs, quilting bees, barn raisings, picnics, mission festivals and other activities. (2002)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• The Menil Collection — 23 mi
  John and Dominique de Menil's free museum in Montrose: a grey-sided Renzo Piano building among bungalows, holding antiquities, Surrealism and art of Oceania under natural light.
• Sam Houston Park and the Heritage Society — 23 mi
  Ten historic buildings gathered in a downtown park below the skyscrapers, among them the 1870 house of the Reverend Jack Yates, built five years after emancipation.
• Rothko Chapel — 23 mi
  An octagonal chapel open to all faiths, built by the de Menils around fourteen dark canvases by Mark Rothko, with Barnett Newman's Broken Obelisk standing in the pool outside.
• Buffalo Soldiers National Museum — 24 mi
  A museum in Houston's 1925 Light Guard Armory that tells the service of Black soldiers from the Revolutionary War onward, built from one veteran's thirty years of collecting.

More markers nearby

• Matthew Burnett Homesite — 2.1 mi
• Cypress — 2.6 mi
• Pillot Cemetery — 6.5 mi
• Wunderlich Farm — 7.3 mi