Former Site of Saint Peter's Church
McLennan County, McLennan County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Before a congregation was officially organized in 1884, a meetinghouse was built on this land owned by Jacob Closner. Under the Rev. Christian Schaer in September, 1887, eight German families started St.Peter's church, Evangelical. Soon Closner deeded this ten acres for use as a church and burial ground. In 1949 a new structure was completed. St. Peter's joined the First Presbyterian Church of West in 1966 in forming the First United Church. The building at this location was sold in 1977 and the property retained for use as a cemetery.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In the 1880s, eight German immigrant families settled near West, Texas, on land owned by Jacob Closner, who deeded ten acres for a church and burying ground. Organized as St. Peter's Evangelical in 1887 under the Rev. Christian Schaer, the congregation worshiped here for generations before merging into the First United Church in 1966. The building was later sold, but the pioneer cemetery remains.
Why it matters
It marks the deep German immigrant imprint on Central Texas, where whole communities carried their faith from the old country to the blackland prairie.
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Related people
- · Jacob Closner
- · Christian Schaer
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Saint Mary's Cemetery
West, TX
As Czech, Moravian, Slovak, and German Catholic families settled northern McLennan County in the late 1800s, they founded a new parish and, in 1892, built St. Mary's Church of the Assumption. The next year the Hromadka family sold this land to the diocese for a cemetery, where more than 2,700 people now rest—pioneers, immigrants, priests, and veterans. Many headstones bear distinctive marble carving and metal ornament, and a large number of the epitaphs are written in Czech.
Groppe Barn
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The town of West grew from a wave of German and Czech immigrants who turned the McLennan County blackland into productive farms. Among them was August Groppe, Sr., who bought this land in 1874, helped found West's German community, and in 1886 hired local builder Joseph Huber to raise this barn. With its brace-frame timber construction, cross-gabled hay door, and angled cross-shaped opening, it is a fine surviving example of a late-19th-century immigrant farmstead.
Church of the Assumption
West, TX
When the Missouri, Kansas & Texas Railroad pushed through central Texas around 1890, the Czech Catholic families of West gained enough numbers to petition their bishop for a church of their own, splitting from the older congregation at Martinville. Their 1892 sanctuary held Masses in Latin but also in Czech — a reminder that faith and mother tongue traveled together across the Atlantic. Fire destroyed the wooden church in 1903, but the congregation rebuilt in brick that same year, and again in 1956.
Groppe Building
West, TX
August Groppe, Sr., one of the first German settlers in the area, had this structure raised in 1892—the very year the town of West was incorporated. A prosperous cotton farmer and businessman, Groppe hired local brickmasons and used bricks made near West to build the first brick building in the town's business district. Over the following century the building housed a succession of enterprises, from dry goods store to grocery to drugstore.