First Methodist Church of Shiner
Shiner, Lavaca County, Texas
Marker Inscription
The Methodist Episcopal Church, South, of Shiner, Texas, was organized on November 1, 1887, in the office of L. P. Amsler, Shiner's first mayor. The Rev. C. C. Armstrong presided over the first service. In 1889 local rancher David Kokernot donated a small building to the community which was relocated to a town lot deeded to the church by the Shiner Townsite Company. The upper floor of the building housed a Masonic Lodge and the ground floor was used for services of the Methodist congregation. Eliza Amsler Welhausen formed a Sunday school in 1890. The original Masonic Lodge/church building was relocated and a new sanctuary was erected in 1914. The congregation began as a mission church and continued to be served by circuit preachers on a part-time basis until 1950 when a full-time pastor was appointed. By that time the congregation had formed a Vacation Bible School and a women's society. In 1954 the congregation was recognized as the outstanding rural church of the Southwest Methodist Conference. A new three-level complex, built here in 1961 on 6.4 acres donated by the Welhausen Land and Cattle Company, represents the congregation's three distinct fields of activity: worship, education, and fellowship. Sesquicentennial of Texas Statehood 1845-1995
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
The Methodist Episcopal Church, South, of Shiner was organized on November 1, 1887, in the office of the town's first mayor, L. P. Amsler. Two years later rancher David Kokernot donated a building whose upper floor served a Masonic Lodge while Methodists worshiped below — a common frontier arrangement. Long served by circuit-riding preachers, the congregation gained its first full-time pastor in 1950 and by 1954 was named the outstanding rural church of its Methodist conference.
Why it matters
The congregation's slow growth from shared quarters and circuit riders to a full parish traces the maturing of religious and civic life across the German-Czech farming country of central Texas.
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Related people
- · L. P. Amsler
- · Rev. C. C. Armstrong
- · David Kokernot
- · Eliza Amsler Welhausen
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Saint Ludmila's Academy
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Shiner's first Catholic school opened in early 1897 in a two-story French-style frame building, named Saint Ludmila's Academy for a Slavic saint and run by the Sisters of the Incarnate Word and Blessed Sacrament. It served fifty-seven students that first year in a community of German and Czech immigrants, teaching those languages alongside piano, guitar, and mandolin. Over the following decades it grew from an elementary academy into a four-year high school and, eventually, the modern Shiner Catholic School.
Masonic Lodge Building
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Relocated to this spot in 1889 by builder David Kokernot, this frame hall did double duty in the small German-Czech town of Shiner — serving both a Methodist congregation and a Masonic lodge, and hosting the community's first Sunday school. When the church moved out in 1914, the Masons took over the whole building, which was recognized as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1967.
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German immigrants settled Lavaca County in the late 1800s, and the Lutheran church anchored their new lives, holding services in German and serving as a focal point of education and social life. Missionary pastor Wilhelm Dziewas, a native of East Prussia, founded this "free" congregation in Shiner in 1896 and planted Lutheran churches across the surrounding towns before dying in the 1919 influenza epidemic. Through a series of mergers it grew into today's United Evangelical Lutheran Dr. Martin Luther Church.
Site of Bunjes School
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