St. John's Catholic Church

The parish is older than its diocese. Pope John Paul II erected the Diocese of Lubbock on June 25, 1983, taking its territory from the dioceses of Amarillo and San Angelo and naming Michael Sheehan its first bishop. Scurry is among its 25 counties. Before that the Lubbock area had passed from the Prefecture Apostolic of Texas in 1841 to the Diocese of Galveston in 1874 and later to Dallas and San Antonio, then Amarillo from 1926. Sheehan was named archbishop of Santa Fe in 1993.

What the plaque says

St. John's Catholic Church This area was settled in the early 1900s by a number of farm families from South Texas. Catholic services were first conducted by priests from Abilene in the homes of Albert J. Kuss, Sr. (1863-1945) and other settlers. The Church of Francis Xavier was built in 1908 on land donated by Robert Herm (1874-1927) in the new town of Hermleigh. In 1936 the name of the church was changed when funds were given to the congregation with the stipulation that its name be St. John's. Included in the new Diocese of Lubbock in 1983, St. John's is the oldest parish in the Diocese. (1988)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Scurry County Museum — 10 mi
  Snyder's county museum on the Western Texas College campus, with the rifle used to shoot the white buffalo, an 1878 chuckwagon and the millionth barrel of the Canyon Reef oil boom.
• Heart of West Texas Museum — 18 mi
  Colorado City's museum in a restored downtown house, from a mammoth dug up at Lake Champion in 2001 to an Ice Age bison and the wartime telegrams sent to a local family.
• National WASP WWII Museum — 21 mi
  Hangar 1 at Avenger Field in Sweetwater, where the women of the WASP trained to fly every aircraft in the Army's arsenal in World War II, then waited thirty-three years to be called veterans.
• Pioneer Museum — 23 mi
  Nolan County's settlement story in a dozen rooms of Judge R. A. Ragland's 1906 house in Sweetwater, a town that started as a dugout store for buffalo hunters and a post office called Blue Goose.

More markers nearby

• Hermleigh — 0.7 mi
• Pyron, Texas — 3.4 mi
• Lone Wolf Community — 6.8 mi
• Dunn — 8.9 mi