An Early Presbyterian Church in Texas
San Augustine, San Augustine County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Organized as the Bethel Presbyterian Church at Goodlaw School House by the Rev. Hugh Wilson on June 2, 1838 with the following charter members: James, Isabella, Joseph and Martha Sharp; H. G. Peggy, James and Elam Alexander; John, Synta and Amanda Polk; Robert and Margaret Tibbets; Elizabeth Erwing; Mary McEiver; Polly Nicholson, Elizabeth Dunham, Catherine Dart, Adeline Stodart; Ann McKnight; and Jack and Hanna Sharp (colored). Erected by the State of Texas 1936
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Founded as the Bethel Presbyterian Church at the Goodlaw School House by the Reverend Hugh Wilson on June 2, 1838, this early Republic-era congregation drew together settler families of San Augustine. Its charter roll named more than two dozen members, including the enslaved couple Jack and Hanna Sharp, recorded among the founders.
Why it matters
The congregation's founding roll preserves both the piety of early Texas settlers and, in its listing of enslaved members, the entangled realities of faith and slavery in the antebellum South.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In 1838, San Augustine was among the first and most important towns in the newly independent Republic of Texas, standing on the old road in from the United States. Settlers were arriving in numbers, bringing with them the institutions of the American South — including its churches and, painfully, its system of slavery.
The Presbyterian church came west with these settlers as one of the established Protestant denominations of the era. Founding a congregation on the frontier meant gathering scattered families, appointing a minister, and recording a charter roll — the founding membership that gave the church its legal and spiritual identity.
That this happened in the antebellum South shapes everything about the record left behind. The congregation formed in a society where enslaved and free people lived, labored, and often worshiped in the same spaces, under deeply unequal terms — and the church's own founding document reflects that reality without disguise.
People & events
The congregation was organized as the Bethel Presbyterian Church at the Goodlaw School House by the Reverend Hugh Wilson on June 2, 1838. Meeting in a schoolhouse was ordinary for a frontier church still years away from a building of its own — worship went wherever there was a roof and a gathering of the faithful.
What makes this marker extraordinary is its charter roll. It names more than two dozen founding members by name — the Sharp, Alexander, Polk, and Tibbets families and many others — preserving an entire founding community in a way few markers do. To read the list is to meet the settlers of early San Augustine one by one.
And the roll does not stop at the free settlers. Listed among the charter members are Jack and Hanna Sharp, recorded as an enslaved couple. Their names appear in the same founding document as those who held people in bondage — a stark, unflinching record of two lives that the surrounding society tried to keep nameless, set down here in the church's own hand.
Its place in the American story
The story of American religion cannot be separated from the story of American slavery, and few artifacts show that entanglement as plainly as a Southern church's founding roll that lists enslaved and free members together. This marker is one of those artifacts, out in the open on a public roadside.
Enslaved people were often part of white congregations across the antebellum South, present in the pews and on the membership rolls even as they were denied nearly every other form of recognition. Their inclusion was never a sign of equality; it was worship inside a system of bondage. Yet the surviving names are precious, because slavery so often erased the identities of the enslaved entirely.
By carving those names into a public monument, this site does something quietly important. It refuses to let a founding history be told only through its free and prominent members. It keeps Jack and Hanna Sharp in the record — a small act of remembrance that speaks to the largest and hardest questions in the American story.
If you visit
This is a marker to read slowly and completely. Its power is in the list of names, so give yourself time to work down the charter roll and take in that you are reading an entire founding community, family by family, set down in 1838.
When you reach the final names, pause. Jack and Hanna Sharp were founding members of this congregation and human beings whom the wider society worked to keep anonymous. Standing here and simply reading their names aloud is its own kind of visit — a way of honoring lives that history nearly lost.
San Augustine is one of the oldest towns in Texas and full of early-republic history, so this marker sits naturally within a broader heritage drive through the region. But let this one be a place where you stop the car and reflect, rather than just snap a photo — it asks something more thoughtful of you, and rewards it.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Hugh Wilson
Themes & tags
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