Zion Lutheran Church and Cemetery

The congregation served a farming district that stayed rural for decades. Helotes was settled in the 1850s mainly by immigrants from Germany and Mexico, and it remained a farming community long after, with cattle drives between San Antonio and Bandera passing through into the twentieth century. In 1919 the Helotes post office handled mail for sixty-four families, sixty of them farmers, and in 1920 and 1930 most of the farms around Helotes were dairy farms. The area also lay on a scenic loop, a favorite drive for San Antonio motorists touring the Hill Country.

What the plaque says

Zion Lutheran Church and Cemetery The earliest burial in this cemetery occurred upon the death of Anton Gugger, a German immigrant who was interred on his farmland in 1881. In 1906, Gugger's descendants donated this portion of his property to the Zion Lutheran Church of Helotes for the church graveyard. The congregation was organized in the early 1900s to serve the German settlers in the Helotes area. Many church members and pioneers of the Leon Valley and Culebra areas area are buried in the cemetery. Both the graveyard and the congregation reflect the area's German Heritage. Texas Sesquicentennial 1836-1986

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Spanish Governor's Palace — 14 mi
  The last visible piece of the Presidio San Antonio de Béxar: a presidio captain's house with a 1749 keystone, a century as shops and saloons, and a romantic 1930 restoration.
• Casa Navarro State Historic Site — 14 mi
  The adobe and caliche-block home of José Antonio Navarro, a native-born signer of the 1836 declaration, and the last remnant of the Tejano neighborhood called Laredito.
• San Fernando Cathedral — 14 mi
  The Canary Islanders' parish church on Main Plaza, where Bowie married and Santa Anna raised a red flag, rebuilt in Gothic Revival around the walls of the 1750s church.
• The Alamo — 14 mi
  Mission San Antonio de Valero before it was a fort: a church its builders never finished, a thirteen-day siege in 1836, and the Army gable of 1850-52 that became its emblem.

More markers nearby

• Helotes — 3.0 mi
• John T. Floore Country Store — 3.0 mi
• Evers Family Cemetery — 5.0 mi
• Huebner-Onion Homestead and Stagecoach Stop — 5.1 mi