Saints Cyril and Methodius Catholic Church (Dubina)

Dubina, Czech for oak grove, was founded in November 1856 by Moravian families who spent their first night in Fayette County under the oaks in a sleeting norther, with a fire and no shelter. Augustine Haidušek, who made the trip at twelve, remembered the women weeping for fear of freezing. He went on to become the first lawyer of Czech descent in the United States. The Handbook of Texas calls Dubina the first Czech settlement in Texas, and for a time it was the stopover for Czechs arriving in the state.

The first church, of 1876 or 1877, was topped with an iron cross made by Tom Lee, a freedman and blacksmith. A storm destroyed that church in 1909, and the community raised $5,571.90 for the present one by Leo Dielmann, finished in 1912. Lee's cross, pulled from the wreckage, went back on the steeple.

No record names who painted the interior: vines, oak leaves and angels on a sky-blue ceiling and walls. In the 1950s it was whitewashed over. In the 1980s Judge Ed Janecka, who had seen faint traces in the sunlight as an altar boy, and Butch Koenig led the parish in uncovering it, using some of the original stencils they found. Janecka painted the last angel left of the choir loft himself and admitted making her brighter. Mind the pews: the Chamber warns that their feet stick out.