One hundred and forty years after its founding, Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church continues to serve the Tomball community. Now based at the Tomball Museum Center, it was relocated from Grant Road in Cypress to Tomball in 1973. The church was built to serve the Neudorf community, a German community located southwest of present-day Tomball, and served as more than just a place of worship.
JoAnn Ehrhardt, a Klein resident who attended Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church as a child, said the church began out of necessity for a Lutheran Evangelical church to be closer to parishioners. Before the church was established in 1876, individuals in the Neudorf community could either travel to downtown Houston for church or attend Salem Lutheran Church in Tomball.
“When you’re on a horse and buggy or a wagon, that takes a long time,” Ehrhardt said. “If they went to church in Houston, they started out early or they went the night before, and they did not come home until on Monday. They had to leave someone home to do the chores [and] take care of the animals.”
According to Lessie Upchurch’s book “Welcome to Tomball,” German settlers William and Henerritta Schmidt donated 3 acres of land on May 20, 1876, to be used for a church and a school. The couple required, however, the gift of land be used by “no other denomination or sect but Lutheran Evangelical,” Upchurch wrote.
Trinity’s congregation built a schoolhouse before building the church.
“They felt education was important for the children, so they built the school first, and all of it was [in] German, until [bilingual services began],” Ehrhardt said.
Members of the congregation built the church using logs from their own land for the structure. Ehrhardt said German immigrant farmers cut the logs into lumber at the sawmill on church grounds. The members contributed at least 18 days each toward the construction effort, but Ehrhardt said many men spent more time than that.
A little more than a decade after construction on the church was finished, a hurricane blew the church off its foundation in 1915, costing the congregation $200 in repairs done by a contractor from Houston, Ehrhardt said. A separate hurricane also destroyed the original schoolhouse.
Ehrhardt said church records state the first wedding within the congregation took place in November 1876, and the last wedding for Trinity’s congregation took place in September 1955. The church is still a popular venue for weddings, although it has no active congregation. Ehrhardt said her granddaughter will be married there in late June.
The congregation of Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church voted in 1940 not to merge with the congregation of St. John’s Lutheran Church in Cypress. However, the two congregations eventually merged in 1961. There was then no longer a need for the old church building, so members of Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church took the original furnishings—chandeliers, altar pieces, the hymn board, and baptismal font—with them before abandoning the building, according to the Tomball Museum Center.
The church building sat abandoned for about 12 years before it was moved to the Tomball Museum Center under the care of the Spring Creek County Historical Association, which continues to care for the building.
At the time of its relocation, the church’s furnishings were returned and can be found within the church at the museum center.
Now, 42 years after its restoration and 140 years after it was built, a framed copy of a Bible verse, Isaiah 43:1, still hangs inside on the left wall of the church’s entryway. Translated from German into English, it reads, “Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name; you are mine.”
“It’s just a very good verse from the Bible to live by, and I feel that was why [the congregation] chose it,” Ehrhardt said.
