The Chapel From La Grange

The chapel standing on this hill was built in La Grange in 1883, sixteen miles away, and served as the sanctuary of the Travis Street Methodist church there. It held a congregation for over a century, was sold in 1994, and was then taken apart and carried here piece by piece between January and April of that year. It is the Edythe Bates Old Chapel now, for the Houston singer and teacher who paid for the purchase, the dismantling, the move and the reassembly, and it holds an 1835 Henry Erben pipe organ, the oldest American built organ still in use in Texas. The chapel is not the only building here to have arrived by truck. A house of 1885, named later for William Lockhart Clayton, who wrote the Marshall Plan, also came from La Grange, and the Menke house of 1902 came from Hempstead. A campus that looks like an old settlement is in fact an assembly, gathered from three towns by people who would rather move a building than lose it. The founding was smaller than the campus suggests. James Dick founded the International Festival-Institute in 1971 and put on two concerts that first year, a ten day session with ten piano students. An abandoned nineteen fifties school building and six acres north of Round Top, ground that had become the town dump, were acquired in 1973. The property now runs to about two hundred and ten acres, with a concert hall seating around eleven hundred. The summer programme is the reason any of it exists. More than thirty programmes run across June and July, and the core of them is orchestral training: young players spend the season rehearsing and performing in a building that came here on a lorry, in a town of eighty seven people.