St. Joseph's Catholic Church

St. Joseph's Catholic Church in New Waverly was the first Catholic parish in Walker County, organized in 1869 by the Rev. Felix Orzechowski, a priest who had come to Texas in 1866 in answer to an appeal for Polish missionaries. It served the Polish families who settled around New Waverly from the 1870s, many of them recruited from Europe between 1870 and 1902 to farm cotton land as tenants for local landowners. In the parish's first years, services were held outdoors or in private homes. Orzechowski left in 1876, returned to Poland, and was imprisoned there by the ruling Russian authorities for advocating democratic ideals. New Waverly was itself a railroad town. When the residents of Waverly refused the Houston and Great Northern Railroad a right of way in 1870, the company laid its tracks ten miles to the west and set aside a townsite called Waverly Station.

Many families moved to it, and the new town became New Waverly. In 1872 Orzechowski also led the founding of Sts. Peter and Paul Church at Danville, four miles west of New Waverly, which was abandoned in the 1920s.

A frame church went up at New Waverly in 1877 under the Rev. Victor Justiana Linicki, who had been a Polish baron before he became a priest. A larger church designed by Tom Lavandoski followed in 1897, and the first building became a school. The present Gothic-style church, designed by L. S. Green, was begun in 1905 and dedicated on the feast of St. Joseph, March 19, 1908, under the Rev. Thomas Aloysius Bily. The parish school ran until 1951, and the church was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1975.