Collection boundaries
This page shows what Texas Defined counts, what it is still researching, and what it deliberately excludes. A church is not promoted because it appears in a travel list; it needs church-specific evidence and a defensible classification.
27
Verified total
14
Formal NR group
3
Candidates
2
Scope exclusions
Verified collection
Research queue
Ellinger · candidate
Held for exact-subject evidence. THC and historic newspaper records verify Catholic history in the Ellinger area, but current archival searches repeatedly resolve to St. Mary's at Hostyn near Ellinger rather than a securely identified surviving Ellinger painted interior. Texas Defined will not promote the church until exact-building decorative evidence is located.
Rockne · candidate
Held for qualifying decorative evidence. THC and local historical sources verify the German Catholic community, the 1892 Sacred Heart church and a documented 1975 interior-renovation discussion, but Texas Defined has not located source-backed evidence that the surviving interior belongs in the Painted Churches decorative-painting tradition.
San Antonio · candidate
Held pending surviving-program verification. The Buie Harwood archive contains a dedicated 16-slide San Fernando Cathedral decorative-painting research group from 1982, and the cathedral's official history confirms the exact historic church and continuous use. That establishes a legitimate research lead, but the current source trail does not yet identify which painted program survives, its authorship, or whether it fits the immigrant decorative-interior scope used for this verified collection.
Scope control
An exclusion does not mean a church lacks important art. It means the building belongs to a different historical/decorative tradition from the collection Texas Defined is defining here.
San Antonio · excluded from this census
Historic mission plaster, pigments and sacred art are important, but this Spanish-colonial mission does not belong to the nineteenth- and twentieth-century immigrant decorative-interior Painted Churches tradition defined by this collection.
Scope sourceSan Antonio · excluded from this census
Its surviving Spanish-colonial frescoes are historically significant but represent a different architectural and cultural tradition from the immigrant-community Painted Churches collection.
Scope sourceMethod