St. Mary's Parish

Two Kentucky priests are behind St. Mary's. Edward A. Clarke and George Haydon, the first American-born Catholic priests to settle in Texas, volunteered as missionaries in 1839. Haydon took Refugio. Clarke moved to Brown's Settlement on the Lavaca River, where residents helped him build a log church dedicated to St. Mary, and the two priests built a two-story log cabin as a school for children and adults. Haydon died in October 1841. Clarke kept riding from the upper Navidad to Victoria and Texana until 1847, when he became pastor in Houston.

What the plaque says

St. Mary's Parish Considered the oldest rural Catholic parish in Texas, St. Mary's was settled before the Texas War for Independence by such pioneers as James Brown, who was killed in the siege of the Alamo. First church edifice for St. Mary's was built in 1840 under influence of missionary Fathers George Haydon and Edward A. Clarke, who also opened school for the settlement. This was one of ten churches comprising Texas' first diocese (Galveston) at its formation in 1847. Many priests' and sisters' vocations have come from this historic parish. (1971)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lavaca County Courthouse — 3.2 mi
  A limestone Romanesque courthouse of 1897-99 on the square of a town founded by a widow trader, in a county seat that once printed the Socialist Party's state paper.
• Spoetzl Brewery — 10 mi
  The brewery a Czech and German railroad town started in a tin shed in 1909, run through Prohibition by a Bavarian who had brewed in Cairo, and then by his daughter.
• St. Mary's Church of the Assumption (Praha) — 16 mi
  The mother parish of the Czech settlements around Flatonia, a stone-fronted church of 1895 whose ceiling Gottfried Flury turned into a turquoise garden, with an August 15 feast since 1855.
• Nativity of Mary, Blessed Virgin Catholic Church (High Hill) — 19 mi
  A red brick Gothic Revival church of 1906 in a German farm settlement, where two San Antonio painters spent 1912 faking marble columns and stone vaults on wood.

More markers nearby

• Vysehrad School — 1.6 mi
• Richardson Chapel United Methodist Church — 3.1 mi
• American Legion Hudgeons Post 230 — 3.1 mi
• First National Bank of Hallettsville — 3.2 mi