St. Joseph School

The plaque credits Father Pelnar with the school building. The parish he served was already mixed. A 1996 parish history lists French, Irish, Bohemian, Czech, German, Polish and Italian families, and says classes were held by 1894 and the parish had 450 families in 1895. The Handbook says Germans, Austrians and Czechs began moving to Brazos County in the 1870s, and Italians in the 1880s. In 1900, 1,403 White residents, 14 percent, were foreign born.

What the plaque says

St. Joseph School The Rev. Joseph Pelnar of Bryan's St. Joseph Catholic Church erected a parish school building here in the early 1890s. The children of East European immigrant families dominated student enrollment at St. Joseph's until about the 1930s. Teachers included M. Elizabeth Carr (1890s), Nuns of the Ursuline Order (1901-1930), and Nuns of the Incarnate Word (1930-1981). Facilities were constructed or acquired at various times to meet increased enrollment which reached its highest level in 1957 with 498 students. The school continues to offer local students general and Catholic educational classes. (1994)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• George H.W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum — 5.4 mi
  The library of the forty-first president on the Texas A&M campus, opened in 1997, where George and Barbara Bush and their daughter Robin are buried in a family plot on the grounds.
• Independence and Old Baylor Park — 25 mi
  A crossroads north of Brenham that was the richest town in Texas when it won Baylor University in 1845, refused the railroad, and lost the college to Waco and Belton in 1886.
• Navasota — 26 mi
  A railroad and cotton town where the La Bahia Road crossed the Navasota River, scarred by an 1865 explosion and yellow fever, and the home ground of the songster Mance Lipscomb.
• Fanthorp Inn State Historic Site — 26 mi
  A cedar-log dogtrot cabin of 1834 on the road through Anderson that grew into a seventeen-room inn and post office for travelers of the Republic, kept by one family until 1976.

More markers nearby

• St. Joseph Catholic Church — steps away
• Site of Odd Fellows University and Orphans Home — steps away
• First Methodist Church of Bryan — steps away
• Town Named for William Joel Bryan — steps away