St. Peter Lutheran Church and Prairie Valley Cemetery

The congregation on this plaque gathered near West Point, a railroad town that grew where the Katy crossed the Texas and New Orleans on what had been called Woods Prairie. A post office opened in 1894 under F. J. Johnson; merchant John L. House, who also ran a molasses press, followed him for thirty years. By 1900 it had four stores, two physicians, three hotels, two gins and a cannery. When Highway 71 passed a mile south, some residents followed, and by 1950 only 140 people remained. Later the land yielded corn and Austin Chalk oil and gas.

What the plaque says

St. Peter Lutheran Church and Prairie Valley Cemetery Sixteen families led by the Rev. R. Osthoff organized this church in 1896. The congregation met at the schoolhouse and Knights of Honor Lodge. Dietrich Hermann Wessels donated two acres for a church and cemetery across the road from the lodge hall in 1900. The first burial was that of Heinrich Georg Wessels in 1900. The St. Petri congregation was recognized by the Missouri Synod in January 1901; the church building was completed in February. Most of the grave inscriptions before the 1930s are in German. Church services were held in German until 1935. Burials in the cemetery are almost all those of church members, including the charter families. With about seventy members and more than 121 graves, both church and cemetery remain active. (1999)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Monument Hill and Kreische Brewery State Historic Sites — 8.3 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.
• Texas Wendish Heritage Museum — 12 mi
  A museum at Serbin of the Wends, a Slavic people from Lusatia whose congregation of nearly 600 crossed on the Ben Nevis in 1854, losing seventy-three to cholera on the way.
• St. John the Baptist Catholic Church (Ammannsville) — 14 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.
• Nativity of Mary, Blessed Virgin Catholic Church (High Hill) — 16 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

• Plum Grove Baptist Church and Cemetery — 2.4 mi
• Joseph C. Robinson — 3.5 mi
• Site of Wood's Fort — 4.0 mi
• Winchester Cemetery — 4.2 mi