Photos of St Josephs Church
About St Josephs Church
St. Joseph's Church is a surprising gem tucked away in the middle of an old farming settlement. This enormous German Gothic brick church sitting almost all alone surrounded by farmland and a handful of houses, definitely not the rural church you would expect to see. The parish goes back to the 1890s, when a priest from the Rhine bought land here and sold it on to German Catholic farmers. That's where the town got its name. Parishioners built the church themselves from more than eighty thousand bricks they made on site, six at a time, on a hand cranked machine. Work dragged on through the Depression and then the war, so it took decades to finish. The scale of this church makes the drive worthwhile, you'll spot it long before you get there. You should be able to pull over during your drive into town and shoot it small in the frame with fields filling the rest of your composition. Sunrise and sunset both work out here, since there's nothing anywhere to block either one. It is still a working parish and the doors aren't always open, but you can call ahead if you would like to photograph the interior too. There's a hand carved wooden altar inside that's older than the building, carried over from the church before it.(Rhineland, Texas, USA)