St. Mary's Catholic Church - High Hill, TX
Posted by: 
WalksfarTX
N 29° 43.046 W 096° 55.669
14R E 700443 N 3289272
One of Fayette County's Painted Churches. It has wonderful examples of faux-finish woodwork and stained-glass.
Waymark Code: WMQ8YC
Location: Texas, United States
Date Posted: 01/12/2016
Views: 3
The grayish blue stone capping the buttresses and accenting the brick was quarried from the nearby town of Muldoon.
The decorative painting of High Hill was executed by Ferdinand Stockert and Hermann Kern in 1912. They also painted the walls and ceiling of Saint Joseph's Catholic Church in San Antonio. Old timers in the parish remember their parents saying that Stockert and Kern first painted their images on canvas and then glued them to the wood walls. Today from the choir loft you can see the bubbles and now hardened canvas close up. When some first set eyes on High Hill, they say that it looks like wall paper and actually, in many places that is what it is.
From Church website:
The High Hill community began when three settlements (Blum Hill, Wursten and Oldenburg) were combined into one in 1858. Father Gury came from Frelsburg to celebrate mass with the Catholics in High Hill, and the first mass was celebrated in 1861 in the Andreas Billimek home.
The first St. Mary church was built in 1869. A larger church was built in 1876, and the original building was used as a school. This newer church featured stained-glass windows donated by the people of the parish. When the present-day church was built, these beautiful original stained-glass windows were moved to the new and larger building, which was constructed in 1906 and painted in 1912. The current church is known as "Queen of the Painted Churches" and is listed in the National Registry of Historic Places.
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