Ross Prairie

Ross Prairie is a scattered farming community on the northern edge of Ross Prairie, two miles south of Fayetteville in east central Fayette County. Originally settled in the 1820s by James J. Ross, one of Stephen F. Austin 's Old Three Hundred , it soon became a center for German and Bohemian immigrants who came in the 1840s. Rev. P. F. Zizelman, a minister of the Evangelical Lutheran Synod of Texas who visited the area in 1851, reported that there was a large Christian German settlement on the prairie; in 1861 a church was built there with him as minister.