A group of almost six hundred Wends, under the leadership of their pastor Johan Kilian, made the journey from central Europe to Lee County in search of religious and economic freedom, and to escape Prussian insistence that they speak German. Wends (also called Sorbs) descend from several Slavic tribes and by the nineteenth century most had been conquered and assimilated. A group arrived in Galveston and made their way to Lee County to form Serbin, named after their Serbian homeland. The town's economic base, trade in cotton and produce, began to decline after the railroad bypassed the town in the 1890s.
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