Page 54 - Visit Fayette | 2017 - 2018 Visotors Guide

How Great This Art

Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Catholic Church in High Hill deservedly carries the name “Queen of the Painted Churches,” with floral designs, portraits and textures
painted on nearly every square inch of the interior.
Fayette County’s Famous Painted Churches

By ANDY BEHLEN this side of the Atlantic. Marble High Hill’s Tiffany-designed but the finest for their houses of
The Fayette County Record and gold leaf were much too stained glass, or Ammanns- worship. The churches brought
Their efforts are almost expensive, but they had paint. ville’s intricately carved Infant civilization, beauty and learning
incomprehensible today. All they Fixtures had to be ordered of Prague statue, swaddled in to what would have been an alien
had were simple tools like block from Europe and shipped across quilts and bouncing across creek landscape for those early settlers.
and tackle, hand saws, hammers, the Atlantic. They would have bottoms in a rickety waggon. If you’re thinking about
chisels, and most importantly, arrived by rail to Schulenburg, The Czech and German visiting one of these churches,
brushes. But they were able to Flatonia or La Grange. From immigrants who peopled Fayette consider booking a tour with
raise steeples that are still taller there, parishioners would have County in the second half of the the Greater Schulenburg Cham-
than most modern buildings transported such items by wagon nineteenth century were content ber of Commerce. Their expert
in Fayette County and carve to country churches scattered to scratch an existence out of the docents will make your trip
altarpieces rivaling anything on around the county. Just imagine dirt, but they demanded nothing more than worth the drive.

St. Mary: Nativity of Mary, Blessed
Virgin (above and right)
2833 FM 2672, High Hill Community.
Elaborate faux-marble columns and vaulted ceil-
ings make this church one of the ones not to miss.
The grayish blue stone capping the buttresses and
accenting the brick was quarried from the nearby
town of Muldoon.
Built: 1906; Architect: Leo Dielmann;
Painted: 1912; Artist: Stockert and Kern
Mass Times: 6:30 p.m. Saturday
Picnic: Labor Day Sunday
Church related information on High Hill - Call
(979) 743-3117
Expert craftsmanship went into the intricately carved altars at High Hill.

54 Visit Fayette | Fall/Winter 2017