Nativity of Mary, Blessed Virgin Catholic Church (High Hill)

High Hill grew out of two German settlements of the late 1840s, Blum Hill and Oldenburg, and its families were German and Austrian-Moravian. By the 1880s it had a Catholic church, four schools and a steam gristmill. Some sources say the town refused the railroad in 1874; the line went to Schulenburg instead, and many residents followed it.

The present church, built in 1906, was one of the first by the Texas church architect Leo M. J. Dielmann, newly back from his studies in Germany. Church leaders of the period pushed for brick or stone, since so many wooden churches had burned or blown down, and the parish built its Gothic Revival walls in red brick around a wooden interior.

That wooden interior is the reason to come. In 1912 Ferdinand Stockert and Hermann Kern of San Antonio painted it in a few months. Eight wooden columns read as ocher marble, and the ceiling ribs read as Gothic vaulting that was never built. Parishioners' parents told of the painters working on canvas and gluing it to the walls, and from the choir loft the hardened bubbles still show. It is one of the fifteen churches listed together on the National Register in 1983 as churches with decorative interior painting. It is an active parish. The Schulenburg Chamber runs guided tours; small groups may also visit on their own Monday to Saturday.