The Church of Saints Peter and Paul

The Sisters of Divine Providence, one of the orders that taught here, came to Texas in October 1866, when two sisters from Alsace-Lorraine arrived and Bishop Claude Marie Dubuis sent them to Austin to open its first Catholic school. Their headquarters stood at Castroville until the motherhouse moved to San Antonio in 1896. By 1872 seventeen sisters and four postulants were teaching in Fredericksburg, D'Hanis, New Braunfels, Frelsburg, Panna Maria, St. Hedwig and Danville, and by 1910 the order ran sixty-nine academies and schools with nearly 10,000 pupils.

What the plaque says

The Church of Saints Peter and Paul German Catholic colonists, who came to New Braunfels in 1845, obtained their promised church and school site (1847) when Bishop John M. Odin was deeded four lots here on "Lustiger Strumpf" (Happy Stocking) Hill -- so called from its shape. A log cabin at first, and then a walnut wood chapel stood here. Since 1871 this Gothic church of native limestone has crowned the hill. The church steeple, felled by an 1881 storm, was rebuilt and had a clock added in 1889. Franciscan Conventual Fathers, Benedictines, and Sisters of Divine Providence have, by turns, conducted school. (1976)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sophienburg Museum and Archives — 0.5 mi
  The hilltop where Prince Carl of Solms-Braunfels raised the Adelsverein's headquarters in 1845, now the museum and archive of the German colony that became New Braunfels.
• Gruene Historic District — 2.8 mi
  A cotton town on the Guadalupe that the boll weevil emptied, rescued in the 1970s by a kayaking architecture student, with a dance hall that says it has never closed.
• Natural Bridge Caverns — 13 mi
  The largest known cavern in Texas, found in 1960 by four college cavers under a ranch family's land, entered beneath a 60-foot limestone bridge and still growing.
• Spring Lake and the Meadows Center — 18 mi
  The headsprings of the San Marcos River, among the longest-inhabited places in North America, once an amusement park with a swimming pig and now seen from glass-bottom boats.

More markers nearby

• New Braunfels Academy — steps away
• International & Great Northern Railroad in New Braunfels — steps away
• Phoenix Saloon — steps away
• New Braunfels: County Seat of Comal County — 0.2 mi