The Presbyterian Church of Gonzales

The founding minister on the plaque had lived a crowded life before 1852. Joel Titus Case, born in Ohio in 1802, finished Yale in 1828 and edited a Mobile newspaper, serving in October 1835 as secretary of a meeting that raised men and money for Texas. He reached Texas in 1838, edited the Galveston Daily Courier and joined the Texan Santa Fe Expedition, which ended in Mexican imprisonment. Ordained in Victoria in December 1850, he was stated clerk of the Western Texas Presbytery for fourteen years and died in Victoria in 1868.

What the plaque says

The Presbyterian Church of Gonzales On February 29, 1852, the Presbyterian Church of Gonzales was constituted with eight charter members, led by the Rev. Joel T. Case. The Rev. John McRae served as the first permanent pastor, and the congregation held worship services once a month in the local Baptist church. In 1875, the Presbyterian church completed its own building, and six years later, members established the first Sunday school with 62 pupils and 13 teachers. A new worship facility, completed in 1925, replaced the 1875 building, and the congregation has expanded its facilities since that time to meet the needs of the congregation's activities. (2002)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Gonzales Memorial Museum — 0.6 mi
  A 1937 Centennial museum for the Immortal Thirty-two who died at the Alamo, holding the small iron cannon Gonzales calls its Come and Take It gun and the Handbook calls a second one.
• Palmetto State Park — 10 mi
  Dwarf palmettos, bogs and a spring-fed oxbow on the San Marcos River, with CCC stonework from the 1930s, a swamp an hour from Austin and San Antonio.
• Spoetzl Brewery — 18 mi
  The brewery a Czech and German railroad town started in a tin shed in 1909, run through Prohibition by a Bavarian who had brewed in Cairo, and then by his daughter.
• St. Mary's Church of the Assumption (Praha) — 26 mi
  The mother parish of the Czech settlements around Flatonia, a stone-fronted church of 1895 whose ceiling Gottfried Flury turned into a turquoise garden, with an August 15 feast since 1855.

More markers nearby

• Military Plaza — steps away
• James W. Robinson — steps away
• Plaza — steps away
• Andrew Ponton — steps away