Geiger Cemetery
Sublime, Lavaca County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Near this site was a town once known as Strunksville. It consisted of a store, post office, saloon and a horse and mule gin owned and operated by one of the first settlers of the town in 1854, Diedrich Strunk. On April 12, 1868, the Lutheran Church was organized by Pastor Christoph Geiger, a German Lutheran minister sent to the United States from a missionary training school in Basel, Switzerland, to serve scattered communities and organize congregations where feasible. The community began burying their dead at Geiger Cemetery as early as 1868, though the date can be contended as some graves are unmarked or illegible. In 1879, Diedrich Strunk, Robert Miller, Sr. And C. Fernau, trustees of the Lutheran Church, purchased 24 acres of land from the Grayson Brothers of Pennsylvania for the sum of $65.50, to include the cemetery. The first church building of the congregation was called Bethlehem. In 1886, Pastor Geiger planned the erection of a larger church on the same site, and on May 26, 1887, Zion Evangelical Lutheran Church was complete. The church was moved to the growing town of Sublime to better serve its congregation, many of whom were residents of the town. In 1905, the church was carefully taken down and moved by oxcart, where it was re-erected at its present location. The cemetery continued its use as the town’s graveyard and in the 1950s, women of the Lutheran and Baptist Churches held ice cream socials and noodle soup suppers to raise funds for a chain link fence and an entrance gate for the cemetery. Families continue to come from miles around to maintain what is one of the oldest cemeteries in the area and one of the few remnants of a bygone town.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Near this spot stood Strunksville, a hamlet of store, saloon, and gin founded by German settler Diedrich Strunk in 1854. In 1868 Pastor Christoph Geiger—trained at the Basel mission and sent to gather scattered frontier congregations—organized a Lutheran church here, and the community began burying its dead in the adjoining cemetery. The congregation's church was later dismantled and hauled by oxcart to Sublime in 1905, but families still return to tend one of the area's oldest graveyards, a last remnant of a vanished town.
Why it matters
It preserves the mission-driven German Lutheran settlement of central Texas and the ghost-town heritage left as railroads and larger towns reshaped the countryside.
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Related people
- · Christoph Geiger
- · Diedrich Strunk
Themes & tags
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