Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1988.
From the record
“Mark's Lutheran Church is a congregation of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod in Elberta, Alabama, United States, established in 1908. It is noted for its historic church on the east side CR 83, which was built in 1927 and added to National Register of Historic Places in 1988.”
Wikipedia article St. Mark's Lutheran Church (Elberta, Alabama), CC BY-SA 4.0.
One of 61 National Register listings published here for Baldwin County · listed in 1988 · category: Building.
Also known as. Rural Churches of Baldwin County TR
Census division. Elberta
National Register reference number.88001353- the number the National Park Service assigned this property when it was listed, and the key its nomination file is catalogued under at the National Archives.
Fires near this property
123 since 1994
Regional context, not property-specific
evidence. The
federal wildfire occurrence database
lists 123 fires within 5 miles of St. Mark's Lutheran Church
between 1994 and 2020, burning about 1,613 acres in total. 3 started naturally. 40 were recorded as arson.
Distance is straight-line from the map coordinates, so a fire counted
here may appear on a neighbouring settlement's page as well.
Reported cause
Fires
Arson/incendiarism
40
Debris and open burning
39
Missing data/not specified/undetermined
28
Recreation and ceremony
7
Equipment and vehicle use
5
Natural
3
Power generation/transmission/distribution
1
The most recent of
them, most recent first, with the day each was reported and the service
that recorded it.
Regional context, not property-specific
evidence. The federal mineral resources record lists
1 working within 5 miles of St. Mark's Lutheran Church: 1 prospect.
None of them still produces. What was taken out: Aluminum. Distance is straight-line from the
map coordinates, so a quarry counted here may appear on a neighbouring
settlement's page as well.
Regional context, not property-specific
evidence. The National Weather Service names
Elberta, the town this property stands in, in 16 storm reports between 1996 and 2025: 7 hail, 3 tornado, 2 lightning, 2 thunderstorm wind.
The reports record 1 death and 1 injury. Each account below is quoted exactly as the forecast office
filed it, from the NOAA Storm Events Database, and each date
opens the federal record of that event.
An eleven year old boy was struck and killed by lightning while watering his animals near Elberta. Witnesses said there was only one cloud in the sky and the sun was shining when the boy was hit. He was likely hit by the first strike from the storm. He had a water hose in his hand when he was struck.
The tornado first touched down near the intersection of County Road 87 and Chatelaine Drive. A few homes experienced shingle damage. Some trees were also uprooted. The|tornado continued moving almost due north, paralleling just east of County Road 87, lifting south of the Dixie Road intersection. Minor tree damage was noted along the path along with isolated instances of very minor structural damage to a few residences.
The tornado touched down just south of the intersection of Kleinschmidt Road and County Road 87, where minor tree damage was observed. Traveling to the northeast, the tornado crossed County Road 87, uprooting a couple of trees and removing portions of the roof from a small barn. The tornado continued to the northeast before strengthening along Woerner Road South. Here, a large barn lost much of its metal roof paneling, and several trees were uprooted. The tornado appears to have lifted before crossing Woerner Road.||October 29th update: Additional drone video was provided along County Road 87 that revealed the path width being close to 125 yards and an additional patch of trees within a tree stand behind the ground surveyed properties that had several skinny pine trees snapped low bringing the intensity to 95mph.||Special thanks to the Baldwin County EMA for their assistance with this survey.||After review of available high-resolution satellite imagery, the tornado was found to have begun slightly earlier in the forest to the south of Kleinschmidt Road. The tornado was also found to have turned to the east as it crossed Woerner Road South where it did minor tree damage before lifting.
No historic map-sheet match is published
for this property yet. That does not mean no map exists. This record needs
a coordinate-quality review before it can be joined to a sheet boundary.
Browse the county's mapped places while that work is
pending.
Listed places nearby
3 within 8 miles
Other National Register properties close
enough to walk or drive between, ordered by distance from this one. Both
positions come from the same geocoding pass that matched these properties
to their map sheets.
Listing record. National Park Service National Register of Historic Places, listed-properties dataset, current to 2026-05-22.
Map join. Address geocoded through the United States Census geocoder, then tested against the published boundary of every sheet in the USGS Historical Topographic Map Collection.
How this page is made. Listing fields come from federal records; map-sheet coverage is a labelled coordinate-to-boundary calculation, not a source-field claim.
Wildfire. Short, Karen C. 2022. Spatial wildfire occurrence data for the United States, 1992-2020 [FPA_FOD_20221014]. 6th Edition. Fort Collins, CO: Forest Service Research Data Archive. https://doi.org/10.2737/RDS-2013-0009.6 Collected with United States Government funding and usable without additional permissions or fees.
Mines and quarries. USGS Mineral Resources Data System (MRDS) https://mrdata.usgs.gov/mrds/ A work of the United States government, no copyright under 17 U.S.C. 105.
Storms. NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information, Storm Events Database https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/stormevents/ A work of the United States government, no copyright under 17 U.S.C. 105. Narratives are quoted verbatim from the National Weather Service report and are not edited or summarised.
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