Sunday Houses: A Uniquely German-Texan Invention
Near Fredericksburg, Texas
In the countryside surrounding Fredericksburg, German immigrant farmers built their working homesteads on land that was sometimes ten or twenty miles from town. Getting to church on Sunday, or to the Saturday market, or to the doctor, meant a journey by wagon that could consume the better part of a day. So they invented a solution that was rare elsewhere in the country: the Sunday house.
A Sunday house was a small second home, kept in town by a farm family specifically for weekend use. They were modest structures, typically one or two rooms with a sleeping loft reached by an outside staircase, built in the spare German vernacular style, usually of frame construction that characterizes Fredericksburg's oldest buildings. A family would arrive on Saturday evening, sleep at the Sunday house, attend church on Sunday morning, conduct their business in town, and return to the farm by afternoon.
The house sat empty through the rest of the week. Many Sunday houses survive in Fredericksburg today, serving now as vacation rentals and private residences. They are a practical architectural solution to a specific problem of frontier geography, as distinctive to this corner of Texas as the limestone courthouses, the carved inscriptions in German on church walls, or the peach orchards that line the roads heading out of town.
