The Oldest Czech Settlement

The Czech families of 1856 came to a place that already had a past and another name. Germans had settled Bluff, above the Colorado, in the 1830s. The Civil War split one Bluff household: John Lidiak, hauling cotton to Mexico, was talked into the Union Army by friends at Brownsville, while his father, Joseph, fought for the Confederacy. Both came home to farm together, and they lie side by side in the parish cemetery. Father Paul Kasper renamed Bluff for Hostyn in Moravia in 1925, and Joseph Cardinal Beran, Archbishop of Prague, dedicated its fifth church in 1966.

What the plaque says

The Oldest Czech Settlement In Texas. Was established at Hostyn when in November 1856 the families of Joseph Janda Valintin Kolibal, Frantisek Koza arrived here from Czechoslovakia.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Monument Hill and Kreische Brewery State Historic Sites — 4.0 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.
• St. John the Baptist Catholic Church (Ammannsville) — 4.8 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) — 8.5 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.
• Saints Cyril and Methodius Catholic Church (Dubina) — 8.9 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.

More markers nearby

• Czech Catholic Union of Texas — 0.8 mi
• Brookfield-Evans-Cremer House — 1.1 mi
• Cedar Cemetery — 1.9 mi
• Philadelphia Evangelical Lutheran Church — 3.6 mi