If you happen to go to West phalia on the day of its an nual Homecoming and Pic nic, you will find yourself at one of the oldest - if not the oldest - community celebration in Falls County.
This year your opportunity to drive the shortest state high way to the oldest state church to attend the oldest community celebration comes on Sunday, Oct. 8.
To make matters more note worthy, this year mark's the picnic and homecoming's 100th year.
You won't be alone. The event draws 5,000 people or more every year, swelling the population of this picturesque community founded by German immigrants 125 years ago to several times its normal size.
Helen Lingnau with the Westphalia Historical Society said the town won't do anything special to mark the 100th homecoming and picnic other than sell T-shirts commemorating the centennial. There's too much work to do make too much of a to-do about it.
Historical milestones are becoming common in Westphalia. In 2004, the community celebrated its 125th anniversary. The Church of the Visitation will have its 125th anniversary in a couple of years.
'We're having our share of historical anniversaries these days,' Lingnau says.
One of the prime draws for the event is the food - fried chicken, sausage, Westphalia noodles, slaw, green beans, dessert and a drink.
A poster for the July 20, 1938, celebration shows the price of meals as 40 cents for adults and 20 cents for children.
Today, a plate goes for $7, still a bargain. All the historical perspective you might expect of a town with such a deep tradition is thrown in for free.
In the celebration's early days, entertainment consisted of music by the Westphalia Brass Band and baseball games featuring the Westphalia Farmers.
This year, Alpine America will provide music prior to the auction. That night, the band Route 4 will play in the Parish Hall.
Westphalia got its start when Theodore Rabroker made his way to the area on his way to Colorado from points north of there. Exactly how he ended up in Central Texas on such a trip isn't quite clear, but he liked what he found here in 1866.
After he made a go of it on the prairie, Rabroker urged several families from the province of Westphalia in Germany,
who were living in Frelsburg, Texas, to move to his place. The town was named Westphalia, in honor of the homeland, in 1879.
The homecoming and picnic is sponsored by and benefits the Church of the Visitation, which was built - twice - in 1884. The original structure was finished in February of that year, destroyed by a storm in May and rebuilt by July.
The present structure, built with six inches of sway built into bell towers on each side of the structure, was completed in 1895.
The church's striking 20-plus stained glass windows were shipped here from Germany. The largest stained glass window is directly behind the main altar and depicts the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin. The central church area is designed to form a Latin cross.
According to a history of the homecoming and picnic researched and prepared by Mrs. Lingnau, the Westphalia homecoming and picnic began as a community fair.
'It was probably the first community fair in Falls County,' she said.
People from the community have always prepared the food. School children, starting with the third-graders, have always cleaned the tables. Neither of those things have changed in the last 100 years, though the noodles were added to the menu some time in the 1960s.
At some point, the community decided to celebrate the crop harvest, and so the homecoming and picnic were moved to the second Sunday in October.
In the early days, the sausage was butchered and ground by hand. The same recipe is used today. For a while a Model A was parked under a shade tree with the back wheel jacked up and removed to pull the grinder.
Today, the Westphalia Market does the butchering while the men go to work making about 3,200 pounds of sausage. Cracker crumbs for the noodles are fried and 1,000 pounds of cabbage has to be shredded for the slaw.
This is a place where people still do things themselves.
For at least one day a year, people outside the community can help themselves to Westphalia's hospitality and history.
