Part 1
Carl Baer, 1868 - 1945, was one of numerous missionaries to Texas who received their training at St. Chrischona Pilgrim Mission near Basel, Switzerland. He immigrated to Texas in 1894 and served several local congregations, the longest being from 1900 until 1944 at the rural Waldeck Lutheran Church in northeastern Fayette County.
Over a period of several years, Baer’s family has donated hundreds of photographs, documents, and other items to the Fayette Heritage Museum and Archives, 855 S. Jefferson, La Grange, where many are on exhibit until later this spring.
Carl Baer (also seen as Karl Bär) was born April 14, 1868, in Dresden to a shoemaker, Carl Gotthilf Baer, and his wife of Wendish heritage, Magdalena nee Witschass. He was the second oldest of five children in a rather poor household.
Baer began school when he was six, but was also required to work in a child’s labor organization during any free time away from his schooling. After eight years of school, he began a fiveyear apprenticeship in typesetting, three years of which were spent in a vocational school. It was during this period that a school acquaintance introduced him to the young men’s Christian organization that set him on the path to becoming a pastor.
In November 1887, Carl Baer and two friends from that organization set off on a sort of spiritual journey to see more of the world.
They wandered several weeks on foot with backpacks through much of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland before coming to Basel, Switzerland, where Baer learned of the print shop at St.
Chrischona. A job opened for him in late February 1888, where he spent the next year until being accepted to study at the Pilgermission St. Chrischona. We know much of Carl Baer’s early history from his application to study at St. Chrischona.
The St. Chrischona Pilgrim Mission was a missionary training school established in a deteriorating medieval chapel near Basel, Switzerland in 1840. Its goal was to bring religion to areas in need. German emigrants requested teachers and pastors be sent to them in Texas as early as 1850.
Among those St. Chrischona missionaries who served in Fayette County were the Rev.
Bosshard, Heise, Geiger, Lieb, Neuthard, Roehm, Treptow, Zapf, and Zizelmann. These men were all Lutheran pastors, but the school’s program left choices of specific church affiliation to the individual student.
Carl Baer studied at St. Chrischona from 1889 until he was ordained as a minister on July 30, 1893. After a brief stint as a city missionary at Frankfurt, Rev.
Baer set sail from Hamburg on The Marsala on July 25,1894. He arrived in New York on August 10, 1894, and soon made his way to Texas, where he was ordained at Brenham in the First German Ev. Lutheran Synod in Texas on October 4, 1894, along with fellow St. Chrischona graduates, Mueller, Wolfsdorff and Harder.
That same day, he is recorded as holding the funeral service of Hermann Conrad Hillebrand at St. John Lutheran Cemetery at Ross Prairie, which is likely his first duty in Fayette County. Rev.
Baer served the St. John congregation through 1895 and officiated at the dedication of the new St.
John Lutheran Church at Ellinger that May.
However, as is true today, pastors of rural Lutheran churches usually had to serve several congregations at once. In 1894, Rev. Baer was also called to serve the congregation at EbenEzer Lutheran Church at Berlin near Brenham, which he served through 1896.
In 1894, residents of the Rutersville area decided to build a new church and call a Lutheran minister. Pastor Carl Baer was employed to come every three weeks to conduct services. There, he received a salary of $75 per year, as well as $2 for baptizing a child and $5 for performing a marriage, funeral, or confirmation. William Janssen and sons erected the new church on a site sold to the congregation by Mrs. and Mrs. William Herdler and J.
C. Rehman. Pastor Baer held the first service there on October 5, 1895, and continued to serve Rutersville until 1912.
The record book for St. John Lutheran Church at Ellinger holds a clear accounting of Pastor Baer's activities in that area between 1894 and 1896. Unfortunately, any church records of Pastor Baer's activities while serving at Rutersville have been lost.
Rev. Baer's fiancee, Minna Niclas (or Niklas), traveled from Germany to Texas via New York with two other young women who were also engaged to St.
Chrischona graduates. On September 15, 1895, only five days after landing in New York, she and Carl Baer were married at Giddings by Rev. Karl Mueller.
Rev. Baer officiated at the Muellers’ wedding the same day. From December of that year through August 1899, Baer served as pastor of the Martin Luther Lutheran congregation at Giddings.
Prior to 1900, Waldeck was primarily served by a Long Prairie German Methodist congregation. However, Rev. Baer learned that Pastor Wenzel from the Greens Creek congregation between Waldeck and Giddings was trying to form a Lutheran congregation at Waldeck and offered to deliver a trial or guest sermon on January 1,1900 in the local schoolhouse. At a meeting held on January 8, he was elected to preach for one year, beginning Pastor Baer's long relationship with the Waldeck Lutheran Church.
Church services were held at the Waldeck schoolhouse on the 1st and 5th Sundays of the month and on church holidays.
Besides Waldeck, Pastor Baer also held services once a month in the Friendship School at Walhalla and in the Hackebeil School at Park, as well as at St. John Lutheran Church at Rutersville until 1914. He is also known to have served the Paige and Dime Box communities in Bastrop and Lee County. In the early days, most marriages and baptisms were held in family homes. The Baers' horse was kept active in all kinds of weather as the young pastor was called to travel as far as fifty miles to perform those rites or to pray for and console the sick and dying.
