Shiner Brethren Church
Shiner, Lavaca County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Shiner Brethren Church Emigrants from Bohemia and Moravia, of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, came to the Vlastenec area, about four miles south of Shiner, in the mid-1880s. Most came from rural areas and were of the Brethren faith, and wanted to establish a new church in a rural setting. The settlers first held services at the Michna School and, in 1891, organized their church, joining the Evangelical Unity of the Bohemian-Moravian Brethren in North America in 1894. After continuing to hold services at the school for several years, the congregation bought one acre here in 1905 on which to build a church. The wooden structure was consecrated August 13, 1905, with the Revs. Henry Juren of Fayetteville, Adolph Chlumsky and Paul Dyck of Brenham, and William Dziewas of Shiner conducting services. The next month, the church hosted the third convention of the Unity of Brethren, which established the Mutual Aid Society, a Christian service organization. In the 1940s, sixteen young men from the congregation served in World War II, and the congregation made a flag of blue stars on a white background, with one star for each man. One church member, Gus Elsik, was killed in service in Italy, and the church changed his star to gold. Church services and records, as well as Sunday school and confirmation classes, were in the Czech language until the middle of the 20th century. The congregation became independent in 1967. It never had a resident pastor, but relied on ministers coming once or twice a month to lead services. The congregation's numbers declined in the latter part of the 20th century as the area's population decreased. (2002)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Emigrants from Bohemia and Moravia settled the Vlastenec area south of Shiner in the mid-1880s, carrying with them the Brethren faith of the old Czech lands. After years worshiping in a schoolhouse, they organized formally and in 1905 consecrated a wooden church, which soon hosted a convention that founded a mutual-aid society. Services and records stayed in Czech into the mid-20th century, and during World War II the congregation hung a service flag with a star for each of sixteen young men who served.
Why it matters
It is a tangible record of Central Texas's Czech immigrant communities, who transplanted their language, faith, and traditions of mutual aid onto the American prairie.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Henry Juren
- · Gus Elsik
Related events
- · World War II
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Shiner Brethren Cemetery
Shiner, TX
Established in 1890, the Shiner Brethren Cemetery served the community of Brethren settlers in the Lavaca County town of Shiner, an area shaped by German and Central European immigration. Terse as its marker is, the burial ground carries the state's Historic Texas Cemetery designation and stands as a record of the faith community that founded it. Its late-19th-century origin ties it to the wave of settlement that filled this part of south-central Texas.
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.
Saints Cyril and Methodius Catholic Church
Shiner, TX
German and Czech settlers in this part of Lavaca County worshiped in private homes and neighboring towns until 1890, when Rev. John Anthony Forest established a mission at Shiner named for the ninth-century Greek missionaries Cyril and Methodius. An 1891 frame sanctuary was wrecked by a tornado and rebuilt larger, and in 1920–21 volunteer laborers raised the present Romanesque Revival church, with stained glass imported from Munich, cut-stone buttresses, and a soaring spired tower.
Cotton Industry in Shiner
Shiner, TX
Barbed wire, the railroad, and German and Czech immigrants hungry for small family farms combined to make cotton king in Lavaca County. From August Stephan's first gin in 1892 through the founding of the Shiner Oil Mill in 1896, ginning, cottonseed-oil processing, and rail export drove Shiner's economy for nearly eighty years. The industry peaked in the 1920s with eight gins inside the city limits—four of them on this very site—before the last bale was ginned in 1971.