Masonic Lodge Building
Shiner, Lavaca County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Moved to this site, 1889, by David Kokernot, the builder. Given to Methodist church and Masonic Lodge. First local Sunday School was held here. In 1914 church was relocated. Entire hall is now owned by Masons. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark, 1967
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
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.
Why it matters
Shared halls like this one show how faith, fraternal life, and schooling all began under a single roof in frontier Texas towns before communities could afford separate buildings.
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Related people
- · David Kokernot
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
United Evangelical Lutheran Dr. Martin Luther Church
Shiner, TX
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.
Saint Ludmila's Academy
Shiner, TX
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.
First Methodist Church of Shiner
Shiner, TX
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.
Site of Bunjes School
Shiner, TX
In 1886 H.J. Strunk sold five acres for a school and cemetery to the Shinerville community, and neighbors shipped lumber from Flatonia and did the carpentry themselves. Renamed to honor trustee Ferdinand Bunjes — who once led a bucket brigade that saved the building from a roof fire — the school grew across decades of irregular, agriculture-shaped attendance, a teacherage fire in 1933, and a new schoolhouse in 1937. The Depression, World War II, and educational reform finally folded it into the Shiner district in 1951.