Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church

The plaque says the church serves two communities; the Handbook of Texas explains why there were two. New Bielau was German, settled just before the Civil War by families from around Industry and named by the 1870s for Bielau in Germany; it also had a German Methodist church from 1879. Content, next door, apparently drew Anglo-Texan settlers and had its own post office from 1865 to 1880. The neighbors shared churches and a school board until both schools were consolidated with Weimar's by the 1950s. New Bielau counted about thirty people in 2014.

What the plaque says

Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church The Rev. G. Geiger organized this congregation on June 2, 1886, with a membership of six families. The church serves two communities, Content and New Bielau, located within one mile of each other. In 1888 the members constructed this church building on a three-acre tract of land they purchased two years later. A cemetery adjoins the frame structure. In 1896 a bell, named "Concordia," was placed in the steeple. A balcony and Sunday School rooms were added to the building. (1985)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Saints Cyril and Methodius Catholic Church (Dubina) — 7.5 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.
• Nativity of Mary, Blessed Virgin Catholic Church (High Hill) — 11 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.
• St. John the Baptist Catholic Church (Ammannsville) — 12 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.
• Stafford Opera House — 15 mi
  A cattleman's bank and theater of 1886 on the Columbus square, in a river town Sam Houston burned in 1836 and a county marked by a long feud and a 1935 lynching.

More markers nearby

• Oakland — 4.1 mi
• Oakland Normal School — 4.1 mi
• Weimar Railroad Depot — 4.7 mi
• Etta Moten Barnett — 4.7 mi