Holy Family Catholic Church
Nazareth, Castro County, Texas
Marker Inscription
The history of Holy Family Catholic Church parallels that of the town of Nazareth. The families of brothers V. A., J. A., and T. P. McCormick and other Irish families came to this area from New York in the early 1890s. The Rev. Joseph Reisdorff arrived in 1902 to establish a Catholic parish. Advertising in German-language newspapers in the U.S. Midwest, he induced many German Catholic families to settle here. Reisdorff named the new town Nazareth. An important part of the area's development, the church remains a focal point of community activities. (1987)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
The story of Holy Family Catholic Church is the story of Nazareth itself. Irish families led by the McCormick brothers arrived from New York in the early 1890s, and in 1902 Father Joseph Reisdorff came to found a parish. Advertising in German-language newspapers across the Midwest, he drew German Catholic families to the plains and named the new town Nazareth, with the church at its center.
Why it matters
It shows how faith and immigrant recruitment together planted whole communities on the American frontier, binding newcomers from different homelands into one town.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Joseph Reisdorff
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Castro County
Dimmitt, TX
Carved from earlier territories and formally organized in 1891, Castro County honors Henri Castro (1786–1861), a French-born empresario who colonized the Texas Hill Country. Castro founded Castroville, Quihi, Vandenburg, and D'Hanis in Medina County, recruiting European settlers — many Alsatian — to a raw frontier. Dimmitt serves as the county seat on the High Plains far to the north of the towns that bear his mark.
Nils Akeson
Hale Center, TX
Swedish-born Nils Akeson came to the thinly settled Texas Panhandle from Iowa in the late 1880s and helped found the town of Hale Center as an officer of its townsite company. He rode for the legendary XIT Ranch, served as postmaster, opened the town's first store, and helped bring the Santa Fe Railroad through in 1909. As mayor, land developer, and school trustee, he shaped nearly every institution of the young town.
Snyder Commnuity
Plainview, TX
Mennonite minister and farmer Peter B. Snyder, hunting cheap land, bought property in Hale County in 1906 and urged fellow Mennonites to join him, and by 1907–08 families were arriving by train and raising houses after first camping in tents. They built a one-room schoolhouse open to all faiths for lessons, worship, and socials. But dust storms, prairie fires, hail, and the brutal droughts of 1915–16 broke the colony, and most—including Snyder—had left by the mid-1920s.
Holy Family Cemetery
Nazareth, TX
In 1902, Father Joseph Reisdorff, the priest and colonizer who founded the German Catholic settlement of Nazareth, set aside donated land for Holy Family Cemetery. The first burial came in 1906, and nine early tombstones still bear German inscriptions, echoing the community's roots. Later decades brought statuary, an arched gateway, tree-lined walks, and memorials, including one to the town's only World War II combat death.