Farmers, Ranchers, the Land and the Falls - Texas Parks & Wildlife ...

A History of the Pedernales Falls Area, 1850–1970
conducted in German. The school may have had as many as twenty students
during its peak years during the late 1870s or early 1880s. According to local
tradition, the schoolhouse also served as a church. In addition to his farming
activities and family obligations, Greene Wilson was or had been an itinerant
Methodist minister; and it was probably he who led the services there. 32*
Figure 5. The Cypress Mill schoolhouse in 1875. The schoolhouse on Greene Wilson’s land
was about the same size. Photo from Ottilie Goeth, Memoirs of a Texas Grandmother,
reprinted with permission from Eakin Press.
*
Greene’s oldest son, James Calvin Wilson, following in his father’s footsteps, later became
a minister himself; and in 1961, many years after he grew up in the little Pedernales Falls
community, he published a book of his poetry, entitled Some Musings of a Religious Mystic
(Brazoria, Texas: 1961).
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