Texas Wendish Heritage Museum

The Wends, also called Sorbs, are a Slavic people of Lusatia on the upper Spree in eastern Germany who never had a nation of their own. In the fall of 1854 a congregation of nearly 600 conservative Lutheran Wends led by Pastor John Kilian left for Texas, the only mass emigration in their history. Cholera broke out among them at Liverpool, and seventy-three died aboard the Ben Nevis. The ship reached Galveston on December 15, 1854, during a yellow fever outbreak, and the Wends walked eighty-five miles inland to New Ulm and Industry while two lay leaders went ahead and bought a league of land in what is now Lee County.

There they built Serbin. They set aside ninety-five acres for a church and school, later St. Paul's, the first Missouri Synod Lutheran congregation in Texas and the mother church of the state's conservative Lutherans. After 1871 the railroad made Giddings the market town, and the Wends spread across south central Texas.

The Texas Wendish Heritage Society was founded in 1971 to save what remained of the language and culture. In 1980 St. Paul's gave it the 1915 parochial school building and leased it an acre, and the museum has grown into a cluster of buildings, among them a log house built by an original settler in 1865, with a research library and archives.