Church Picnic in Uhland, aka Birthday Lunch in the Countryside

We are always on the lookout for church picnics. They are not as common here as they are in the Chech country to the southeast. Nevertheless, we saw an ad in the paper for a church picnic, raffle, flea market, and what have you at the Lutheran Church in Uhland.
We knew where Uhland is, just north up Hwy 21 and about due east of Kyle. We motored up there and did have a bit of trouble finding it as the church yard was empty with no activity, and in fact saw no activity anywhere in the area. Making another pass through this little community, we spotted about 20 cars at the community center, so we pulled in there. Its on the old Spanish Trail road which parallels Hwy 21 about 100 yards away, but not very visible from 21. We asked if this was the right place for the turkey dinner and sure enough, it was.
The dinner was $8 each, was inside the community center and served in an line with beans, (always), sauerkraut, sweet potatoes, dressing, turkey and cranberry sauce. Yup, all the trimmings---but sauerkraut for a turkey dinner appeared to be someone else's view of turkey dinner dressing. It was a german church, so thus the sauerkraut.
Not many (none) teenagers present, I guess they had something better to do, and besides it might have been true.
Here's a shot of the inside of the Community Center, showing the serving line and some of the diners.

Then, after the lunch was over, we had dessert of a dark colored cake, somewhat like carrot cake, but the ladies claimed it was pear cake. Never had pear cake before, so found that quite good. We got to chatting with a man outside and two more men joined in the conversatioin as we were talking about history and the old times of the area. The main figure was as man whose name was Garza and he has lived closeby for many years, but early on lived in San Marcos. As a child, he remembers picking cotton as his family moved with the cotton and picked it for cash.

We then moved on to the subject of one-rrom schools and it turned out that this Community Center was a one-room school, having been finished as a school in about 1950 when it was consolidated with Kyle schools. It did not fit my image of a one-room school as it had no bell tower and was quite squat. It did have nice wooden floors and several rooms, so it was not uniquely a one-room school. The men thought that maybe the school grades were 1-9, but 1-8 for sure.

Here is a photo of the school.

The day ended, and so we left for the next stop---groceries. Must come back to this area for some more exploration though.

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