Found an abandoned Catholic Church in Medina County, Texas

When I think about the Catholic Church in Texas, I think of Spanish colonizers and their aftermath. But here in Medina County, Catholics from Alsace, France, came, saw, and (if not conquered) made their mark, and that mark includes architecture, food and churches.

My sister brought us here to see the ruins of Saint Dominic Catholic Church, and it was like touring an ancient European abbey. Which it is, in an American sense. A congregation formed in 1847 when D’Hanis colony was founded; in 1853, the town became a mission parish and the church was built of local limestone. According to church records, the timber frame was hauled by ox-cart from the Medina River.  In 1868, the first resident pastor arrived, and a sandstone extension was built just for him. The cemetery in back dates to 1847, beginning with the burial of a child of settlers from Alsace. Some of the graves are in German, others in what looks like an Alsatian dialect.

As for the ruins? Blame the saga of the American rails. Southern Pacific Railroad missed the town — with grievous economic impact. So, not to be ignored, in 1913 the town moved 1.5 miles west to “New” D’Hanis. And so did the parish church. And now we see what happens to a church ignored for 100 years….

More church images.

NB: In the mid 1800s, two towns were established by Alsatian immigrants (the local info terms them “settlers”) who’d been led to Texas by a count named Castro and his representative, Theodore Gentilz. Castroville (named for the count) and D’Hanis (the surname of the “Manager of the Colonization Society”) remain strongly marked by the influx, with dozens of residents who can trace their line back to the initial settlement.

 

A Houston canopy

In the old part of Houston, the oaks form a thatched roof overhead. This was taken just outside the Menil.

In Hondo, with Peafowl

In Hondo, with Peafowl

The dog is suspicious, and rightly so. They are loud and will walk everywhere, and leave sincere brown piles of crap wherever they go. Then they step in it and traipse it further, or closer. In the afternoon, the men pick up a bb gun and head to the front porch. Swapping the weapon back and forth, they shoot at the creatures for a half hour or more, hoping to scare them away, or to train them to be scared. But the peafowl are too dumb for that. Dumb and beautiful, and prowling all over the property.

Official Charm in Texas

Charming Brenham Texas–officially charming that is, and almost deadly with charm, or deadening, somehow with its gift shops and bakeries and antique stores and gift shops and more gift shops and (did I mention?) gift shops–is a fine place to stop for coffee and ice cream and a bathroom break when heading west from Houston toward Austin, or from Magnolia to Boerne, or when just driving around Texas during bluebonnet season. (And oh yes, a lot of those knickknacks in the gift shops involve bluebonnets.)

But honestly, it’s hard not to shop here. And yes, occasionally I’ve been determined to find some seriously super Texan souvenirs–though my husband once bought a pair of cowboy boots that got worn exactly twice, I’ve given some cute little tea towels away that are used to this day–but this week when driving to Boerne and Hondo and stopping in Brenham for coffee I remembered pecans, that great southern staple so loved here and about which I’d read something recently — but what was it?

Pecans, I knew, would be sold in Brenham.

Naturally, I didn’t want the pecans from the officially charming pecan places, so it took some effort. A little. First I asked at the charming cafe where we’d gotten our excellent coffee and our mediocre banana bread and got the names of a couple places right on the square. (The great thing about the charming cafe? It wasn’t so charming on closer inspection. Back toward the bathrooms there was a massive room that smelled of cigarette smoke and held about four pool tables.)

We decided to try one but we were not feeling it, really, not sure about it. On our way back to the car we saw the post lady and as I stared, thinking of how much she would know vs. how willing she would be to impart it to a couple of obvious tourists, she greeted us with a loud hello. (This really is my state.) Turned out–big surprise–she knows of a place where her parents bring their pecans to be cracked when they have a big season, too big to handle on their own, and it’s one block over then right across the railroad tracks and on the right on S. Park Street. And holy Jesus, there we meet Betty whose been in the biz with her husband since 1939 when he wanted to do something on his own and not rely on the family money and get all tangled up in the family purse strings and so got into a bunch of businesses including this one, right here where we are standing, in an old warehouse for shelling and wholesaling pecans. Betty told us that this is the first year since 1916, when her husband was born, that there were no local pecans. Which reminded me then of what I’d read, that this had been a bad year for pecans and the Chinese had suddenly developed a taste for them and the result was a terrible shortage.

Some years we sell over a hundred thousand pounds of pecans, but not this year, she said.

I did not take a picture of her. It would have been too embarrassing all around.

Betty wore comfortable shoes and a simple white shirt and polyester stretch-waist pants and  carried around a cracker & sheller like some Buddhists bear their beads or more actively, like a boy and a knife, or more purposeful, like a dealer and a deck of cards, a mason and the flat metal paddle that spreads the mortar, there’s work to do and she’s 80-some-odd and why not work, she says, why not when her friends retire and pretty soon they get all stiff and she’s heard about more digestive troubles than anyone ever should….not her. No. She’s working. She cracked a few so we could try them, taste the difference, scolding my husband mildly for eating them too close together, apologizing for not having wine to sip in between to clear the palate. She charmed the hell out of us, officially. She rang us up for three of the four kinds of pecans they were selling that morning, the Elliots in halves and the Pawnees in pieces and something else still in its shell and then she went on to the next thing, some problem with an order, discussing it with her son, ready to take the call and we had to go and all I got was this shot of the warehouse and thank goodness I know where to go for pecans whenever I’m in Brenham, Texas.

What Really Makes the World Go

All day I’ve wanted to post a picture of my friend’s Père David’s deer with his gal pal Milu. The pair are noshing on breakfast, and I remembered it as a charming picture, so I wanted to share it here.

Then I went poking around for a little more information on the strange creatures–also to get the accent aigu right for the post–and found the google category: pere david deer hunt. (No accent aigu on that one.)

I’m not surprised. I’m not surprised. I’m not. I know the story, I do. I know this story, anyway:

Texas XX XX allows the opportunity to hunt and harvest the Trophy Pere Davids Deer you’ll want to hang on your wall. From May to December, we offer hunts for World Record Class Pere Davids Deer. There are no seasonal restrictions on hunting the Pere Davids Deer in Texas, which makes it a suitable trophy most of the year.

I guess “harvest” means “kill.” I’m no vegetarian, but it’s hard to feel good about a world where people pay to kill animals that have gone extinct in the wild so that they might have a suitable trophy. As opposed to an unsuitable trophy. It’s not disgusting to everyone, to go exotic-deer hunting. Having grown up in Texas, I know a lot of people who think it’s cool. Everything’s relative: I think about the things I do, the places I go, to feel important, valuable. The souvenirs I acquire when traveling are like trophies, a little.

Everything is not relative.

Here they are, enjoying their morning repast, free from predators. For now.

the hooves of a cow but not a cow, the neck of a camel but not a camel, antlers of a deer but not a deer, the tail of a donkey but not a donkey

Last Winter Solstice, when I drove around Texas, I stopped by my friend Jane’s place in Boerne and saw the Père David’s deer that had appeared on her property months earlier. The funny, definitely archaic-looking creature was discovered by an old French missionary, Père Armand David, back in 1866 when he was trying to convert the Chinese. (Wonder how that went.) Also known as the milu, it is still among the rarest 10 species in the world.

The Père David’s deer is presumably native to Northern China, but (according to Wikipedia) archaeologists have found their antlers at settlements from the Liao River in the north to Jiangsu and Zhejiang Province and across the Yellow and Yangtze River Basins in Shaanxi and Hunan Province. By the time the priest came upon them at the Emperor’s game park near Beijing, few remained. He sent a carcass back to Europe. Right away an Englishman got interested in the funny creature and brought a group of them back to his estate in England, Woburn Abbey. A few other Europeans followed suit at the end of the century and they were scattered around several zoos on the continent.

This was most fortunate, because much of the Chinese herd died in a flood in 1895 and the remaining deer were killed during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900.  

Best of all, the marvelous Wikipedia also describes the deer’s Chinese name, sibuxiang:

sibuxiang (Chinese: 四不像; pinyin: sì bú xiàng; Japanese: shifuzō), literally meaning “four not alike”, which could mean “the four unlikes” or “like none of the four”:

• “the hooves of a cow but not a cow, the neck of a camel but not a camel, antlers of a deer but not a deer, the tail of a donkey but not a donkey”
• “the nose of a cow but not a cow, the antlers of a deer but not a deer, the body of a donkey but not a donkey, tail of a horse but not a horse”
• “the tail of a donkey, the head of a horse, the hoofs of a cow, the antlers of a deer”
• “the neck of a camel, the hoofs of a cow, the tail of a donkey, the antlers of a deer”

It’s like a poem!

(From: “China To Return More David’s Deer To the Wild”. People’s Daily Online. January 13, 2000.)