The United Methodist Church of Hope

Hope took its name from a trading post, not a church. The Handbook says the community was settled before the Civil War; its post office and first schoolhouse both date to 1857, and the log school had high steps to keep out wild hogs. The post office closed in 1906. A son of the church's land donor, Charles Martin Hornberg, became an ordained minister who served here. In the 1980s the remaining residents pooled money to buy the 1902 schoolhouse for a community center.

What the plaque says

The United Methodist Church of Hope German pioneers founded this church before 1845. It met in a log hut on Scarborough's Branch, had 23 members in 1850s, used German language in worship, and was in German missions circuit. Christoph and Christina Hornburg gave a 2-acre site on Clark's Creek in 1855, and the second log meeting house was erected. The present church was built in 1889 on newly-purchased site in hope. By 1890, the membership reached about 100. The Sunday School was organized in 1892, and remains active. Up to 1894 this was the only church in hope community. (1976)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lavaca County Courthouse — 16 mi
  A limestone Romanesque courthouse of 1897-99 on the square of a town founded by a widow trader, in a county seat that once printed the Socialist Party's state paper.
• 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.
• Chisholm Trail Heritage Museum — 20 mi
  A cattle-country museum in Cuero's 1903 Knights of Pythias Hall, telling the Guadalupe Valley's 1866 drive north and the Sutton-Taylor feud that bloodied DeWitt County.
• Gonzales Memorial Museum — 33 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.

More markers nearby

• Hebron Community — 4.8 mi
• Terryville — 5.5 mi
• Joel Ponton — 5.6 mi
• Ezzell School — 7.4 mi