Vienna (Cheney Settlement)

Vienna sits on a river that depends on rain. The Navidad, named for the Nativity of Christ, runs seventy-four miles from southern Fayette County to the Lavaca River; it has no springs, and its upper reaches fill with log jams. When it overflowed on June 30, 1940, by the Handbook's date, it flooded every building near its banks. The plaque says July. Accounts also differ on who suggested the name: the plaque credits Benjamin Milby in 1873, the Handbook John Mixon. Forty people were counted here from 1980 through 2000.

What the plaque says

Vienna (Cheney Settlement) The community of Vienna has roots that reach back to the Republic of Texas. Maryland native John Cheney (1796-1868) brought his family to Texas in 1830 when Native Americans, including his wife Lucy, were expelled from their home in Georgia. Cheney served as Constable and Justice of the Peace in what was then Colorado County. His home on the west bank of the Navidad River, once including more than 7,000 acres, became known as Cheney Settlement. The Cheney family sold off portions of the family farm, and an influx of German, Austrian and Czech immigrants arrived. In 1873, Benjamin Milby opened a post office named Vienna in honor of the Austrian capital. In the 1880s, Pat Carvelle gave land for a school, which the community built with lumber hauled from Schulenburg. John Mixon operated a general store and the post office from 1885 to 1906, followed by postmaster Louis Teltschick, who also built and operated a cotton gin, sawmill, grist mill and blacksmith shop. Vienna was also a popular picnic spot in the early 20th century, with picturesque crossings of the Navidad River nearby. A July 1940 flood severely damaged the gin complex, though, and sent the Louis Teltschick family to the upper portion of the gin for shelter. The congregation of Vienna Baptist Church, founded at Seclusion (6 mi. SE) in the 1880s, moved next to the school in about 1915, the same year the post office closed. During the 1940s, the gin, school and several stores closed, and construction of Farm to Market Road 530 from Hallettsville to Edna in the 1950s hastened the dispersal of Vienna. Today, Vienna Baptist Church (1 mi. NE) is the only surviving building of this once viable rural community. (2006)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lavaca County Courthouse — 10 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 — 23 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.
• Saints Cyril and Methodius Catholic Church (Dubina) — 24 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) — 25 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.

More markers nearby

• Rabb Switch — 6.2 mi
• Sublime Baptist Church — 7.2 mi
• Petersburg — 7.4 mi
• Vsetin Cemetery — 8.7 mi