Texas Wendish Easter Eggs

by: Bobby McDonald

 

 

As with all ethnic groups that helped to settle early Texas, the Wendish settlers who made their way to Central Texas, near LaGrange, Giddings, and Serbia, brought their own customs from the homeland with them. The Wends, Slavic-Germans, settled in this area and brought the unique custom of beautifully decorated Easter egss with them. They have four techniques for decorating eggs: Wax Batick, Acid, Scratch, and Embossed.

 

 

The most commonly used technique in Texas is the Wax Batick method, in which the wax design is applied to the egg with the tip of a goose feather cut into geometrical shapes, or the head of a straight pin. The wax protects the egg from taking the dye. Multicolored eggs are created by applying the designs in stages, dipping the egg in a different color dye after each waxing. When the egg is completely decorated, the wax is removed and the egg is oiled with vegetable oil.

 

 

 

The Wends, also known as Sorbs or Lusatian Serbs, are a Slavic people who migrated from Eastern Germany near the upper Spree River Valley, an area long known as Lusatia. They spoke the Sorbian language. During the Middle Ages the Wends survived the raids and massacres of German Eastland horsemen. It was in the fall of 1854, that a band of some 600 conservative Lutheran Wends, who were feeling the pressures of religious persecution and led by John Kilian, left Germany to come to Texas. The event was the largest single migration of Wends from their homeland. They traveled by railway and steamship to Liverpool, England and embarked for America on the English ship, Ben Nevis. While in Liverpool, a number of Wends contracted cholera and seventy-three of them died on board the ship. The ship docked in Queenstown, Ireland, where the group was quarantined for three weeks, while the sick were nursed and the ship was fumigated. From Ireland, the ship sailed to Galveston and arrived in that Texas port on December 15, 1854.

 

 

Galveston was having a yellow fever epidemic and the Wends skirted the city and many walked the 85 miles to the New Ulm and Industry communities, in Central Texas. Two lay leaders of the congregation, Johann Dube and Carl Lehmann, went on ahead and purchased a league of land in what is now Lee County, Texas. A two-room house was built by Kilian and one room of it was used as a place of worship for the decimated and starving settlers. As the group settled into farms and begun making plans for homes, they set asside 95 acres for a church and school. This was the first Missouri Synod Lutheran church founded in Texas and is the mother church for all conservative Lutherans in Texas. After their first tiny, log church was built, individuals began surveying farms and building crude dugout homes for shelter and established the small town of Serbin, Texas.

 

 

Through the years the Wends spread throughout South Central Texas and many descendents of these original settlers still live in Lee, Fayette, Williamson, Coryell, and Bell counties. Towns such as Giddings, Warda, Fedor, Manheim, Loebau, Lincoln, The Grove, Swiss Alp, Thorndale, Walburg, Aleman, and Noack join the original settlements of Serbia, New Ulm, and Industry as being heavily influenced by the Wendish traditions. Beautiful churches, ornate crafts, and traditional foods continue to abound throughout the area.

 

 

 

 

 

The Texas Wendish Museum, Serbia, Texas.

 

Today, many of the Wendish descendents continue to keep sacred the customs that the original founders brought with them and celebrate their rich, rich heritage. The Texas Wendish Heritage Society was founded in 1971 and today operates the Texas Wendish Museum in Serbia, Texas, where the traditional Wendish Easter Eggs are on display, as well as a number of books and research material about the heroic settlers who made the trip back in 1854, as they blazed a unique trail to Texas.

 

 

 

________