Glen Flora

Glen Flora is at the junction of Farm Roads 102 and 960, on the east bank of the Colorado River six miles northwest of Wharton in Wharton County. The area's first settlers, members of Stephen F. Austin's Old Three Hundred, were John C. Clark and Robert Kuykendall. About 1890 C. H. Waterhouse moved to Wharton County and purchased large tracts of land on the west bank of the Colorado. He brought in German families from his home state of Pennsylvania to tenant-farm his acreage. He established a large sugar mill and pumping plant as well as a cotton gin across the river from his home. The pumping plant was advertised as the largest one in Texas. The Waterhouse Rice and Sugar Company changed names and ownership several times. It began with the name Waterhouse; when partners were added, it was renamed the Pittsburg-Glen Flora Sugar Company; it was then sold and renamed the Kincheloe Irrigation Company (asit was located in one of the Kincheloe leagues). Later it was resold and named the Wharton County Irrigation Company by R. H. Hancock.

The German families were established about a mile west of the sugar mill. There Waterhouse set aside five acres for a church and a cemetery. The residents called their settlement Vesperville. In 1895 they built a church, St. John's Lutheran; its services were conducted in German only. The church building was completely destroyed three times while at this site: by a hurricane in 1909, by a tornado in 1910, and by a fire in 1918. The congregation moved the church to Glen Flora in 1919, but the new structure was destroyed by a tornado in 1929. A fifth building survived in Glen Flora until 1941, when the congregation decided to move it to Wharton and renamed it St. Paul's Lutheran, as there was already a St. John's Lutheran in Wharton.