St. Mary's Catholic Church

The parish on this plaque stands just outside a railroad town. Ellinger began as a stop on the La Grange Tap, a spur of the Galveston, Harrisburg and San Antonio, on 200 acres given by John H. Meyer and Henry Fordtran. Resident Andreas Ondrey suggested the name, honoring San Jacinto veteran Joseph Ehlinger, whose family settled here after his death. A post office came in 1877. Cotton built a town that by 1900 had two churches, four lodges, fourteen stores, two gins and four saloons, before the Katy line through Fayetteville, four miles north, drew trade away.

What the plaque says

St. Mary's Catholic Church In the 1850s, families of German and Czech origin in the Ross Prairie area were served by visiting priests. After 1855, they worshipped in a log church (2 miles N) named Saint Joseph, the first permanent Catholic church in Fayette County. The church moved to Live Oak Hill about 1861, and purchased this site near the settlement in 1864. The first resident priest arrived in 1872, and a larger church structure, named Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary (St. Mary's), was built in 1879. After it burned in 1905, this Gothic-styled church was built here now called Hostyn Hill--in 1906. Texas Sesquicentennial 1836-1986.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• St. John the Baptist Catholic Church (Ammannsville) — 12 mi
  A wooden Carpenter Gothic church built in 1919 after storm and fire took two before it, its dusty-rose interior painted by an artist whose name was lost for decades.
• Monument Hill and Kreische Brewery State Historic Sites — 12 mi
  A shared tomb on the Colorado River bluff for the men of the Dawson fight and the black bean lottery, beside the ruins of a German stonemason's spring-fed brewery.
• Saints Cyril and Methodius Catholic Church (Dubina) — 13 mi
  The church of Texas's first Czech settlement, under a sky-blue painted ceiling that was whitewashed in the 1950s and brought back from faint traces by its own parishioners.
• Stafford Opera House — 13 mi
  A cattleman's bank and theater of 1886 on the Columbus square, in a river town Sam Houston burned in 1836 and a county marked by a long feud and a 1935 lynching.

More markers nearby

• The Rev. Jindrich Juren — 2.3 mi
• James J. Ross — 3.0 mi
• St. Paul Lutheran Church — 3.6 mi
• Sarrazin Store — 3.6 mi