St. Mary's Catholic Church

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Now, St. Mary's Catholic Church out in Gillespie County, this is a story about a congregation that kept growin' and growin' until the walls just couldn't hold them anymore.

By the late 1800s, membership was swellin' fast, and by 1901 the plans were drawn. They were going to build something worthy of the faithful who had packed those pews. Something that would last.

It took five years of planning and preparation, but in 1906, the vision became stone. And not just any stone. Native stone, quarried from the land itself, shaped into a Gothic-inspired structure that would stop you in your tracks the first time you rounded the bend and saw it.

The man behind the design was Leo M. Dielmann, a prominent San Antonio architect, and the man who turned those drawings into walls and arches was contractor Jacob Wagner. Now, here's the detail that gives this building its soul.

That asymmetrical front facade, the one that catches your eye because it isn't quite balanced, because it doesn't try to be, it anchors a dominant corner tower and spire. And up in that tower hang three bells. Three bells that weren't new.

They had been ringing over that congregation since 1863, carried over from the nearby sanctuary that had served St. Mary's for decades. The new building rose around an old voice.

Then came the windows. Commemorative stained glass, installed in 1906 and again between 1914 and 1917, filling the sanctuary with colored light. And the altar windows, well, those carry something personal.

The faces portrayed there belong to the daughter of Jacob Wagner, the very man who built the church, and the son of an early parishioner. So the builder left more than mortar and stone. He left his daughter's image, caught in light, to watch over every service that followed.

That's the kind of thing that makes a building more than a building.

What the marker says

Rapid membership growth during the late 19th century prompted St. Mary's Church to complete plans for a new sanctuary in 1901. This Gothic-inspired native stone structure was designed by prominent San Antonio architect Leo M. Dielmann and built by contractor Jacob Wagner in 1906. It features an asymmetrical front facade with a dominent corner tower and spire containing three bells transferred from the nearby 1863 sanctuary. Commemorative stained glass windows were installed in 1906 and 1914-1917; altar windows portray Wagner's daughter and the son of an early parishioner.Recorded Texas Historic Landmark-1995