St. Mary's Catholic Church Windthorst

The colony's land came from the Circle Ranch of the Clark Plumb Pasture Company, and the sellers, Derr Clark and Duncan C. Plumb, paid for a rectory, a church and a school. F. T. Ledergerber of St. Louis led the buyers, and the town was named for Ludwig Windthorst, a German Catholic statesman. A wooden cross, its name misspelled Windhorst, stood on the 1,088-foot hill where the church was built. By 1893 there were forty settlers and by 1895 seventy-five families. Sisters were teaching the parish school as a public school by 1922.

What the plaque says

Obtaining 75,000 acres of Archer County land for a farm colony in 1891, German-American Catholics planted cross here and laid off Windthorst around a 20-acre site for church, school, and rectory. Ernest Hoff built town's first structure, a home. There on Jan. 1, 1892, Father Joseph F. Reisdorf celebrated the first Mass in Windthorst, before 10 parishioners. The first church was dedicated in 1893, second in 1904. The present one, third for the parish, was completed in 1925. Two members of parish have become priests. St. Mary's Church continues to be the center of community life. (1974)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Royal Theater — 11 mi
  Archer City's movie house, burned in 1965, given a false front for The Last Picture Show and brought back by the town in the 1990s as a working stage on Main Street.
• Lake Arrowhead State Park — 13 mi
  A prairie park on the north shore of the Wichita Falls water-supply lake, which drowned the town of Halsell in 1965-66, with mesquite campsites, a lighted pier and more than 200 bird species.
• Clay County 1890 Jail Museum — 22 mi
  Henrietta's 1890 stone jail a block from the domed courthouse, now the county museum, with its original cells, a gallows that was never used and the sheriff's family quarters.
• Kell House Museum — 23 mi
  The 1909 Classic Revival house of Frank Kell, the miller and railroad builder who helped make Wichita Falls a city, shown by guided tour with its family furniture still in place.

More markers nearby

• J. H. Meurer Home — 5.9 mi
• Bridwell Park — 6.6 mi
• Archer County Jail — 11 mi
• Camp Cureton, C.S.A. — 11 mi