Blooming Grove United Methodist Church
Blooming Grove, Navarro County, Texas
Marker Inscription
In 1869, Richard and Susan Gowan gave land on Rush Creek (1 mile southeast) for a Methodist Church and cemetery. Gowan, his neighbors, and others built a white frame chapel for church and school. That building was moved to Blooming Grove in 1887. Second sanctuary was built in 1893 on the present site. The Methodist denomination operated (1899-1913) Central Texas College in Blooming Grove, increasing work of this church. Dr. Clovis Chappell (1882-1972) and Dr. E. B. Hawk (1881-1963), pastors who later won national renown, led in building (1913) the present edifice. The congregation has given 22 men to the ministry. (1974)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In 1869 Richard and Susan Gowan gave land on Rush Creek for a Methodist church and cemetery, and neighbors raised a white frame chapel used for both worship and school. The congregation moved to Blooming Grove in 1887 and built successive sanctuaries as the town grew, its work bolstered by the Methodist-run Central Texas College from 1899 to 1913. Pastors Clovis Chappell and E. B. Hawk, who later won national renown, led construction of the present church in 1913.
Why it matters
The church shows how frontier Methodism knit together faith, education, and community life in rural Texas, sending 22 of its own into the ministry.
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Related people
- · Richard Gowan
- · Susan Gowan
- · Clovis Chappell
- · E. B. Hawk
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Site of University Training School - Central Texas College
Blooming Grove, TX
In 1899 the Methodist Church's Corsicana District opened a college preparatory school on this site, and the following year the University Training School began teaching under the Rev. J. W. Adkisson. A junior-college curriculum was added in 1909, and the renamed Central Texas College served students from an ornate three-story Victorian building until it closed in 1912. Though short-lived, the school helped lay the groundwork for public education in Blooming Grove.
Blooming Grove School
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When pioneer Richard Gowan donated land near Gradyville in 1869, the little frontier community pooled its labor to raise a single white building that served at once as church, meeting hall, and schoolhouse. As the town grew and then relocated north to meet the Cotton Belt Railroad in 1888, its schools followed—frame giving way to two-story frame, then red brick, each outgrown or condemned in turn until the modern campuses of the 1980s. The Texas Legislature chartered the independent district in 1917, and accreditation followed under superintendent S. W. Henderson.
Ash Creek (Pelham) School
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Founded in 1899 in the historically African-American community of Pelham, this school first met in the local Methodist chapel before a two-story schoolhouse rose near the cemetery in 1908. Uncommon for a rural Black school of its era, it taught all twelve grades, sending graduates on to college. In 1921 its trustees drew on the Chicago-based Rosenwald Foundation—Julius Rosenwald's landmark partnership with Southern Black communities—to build a larger school, which served until consolidation in the 1960s.
Meritt Drane
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Born in Kentucky to a wealthy farming family, Meritt Drane set out for Texas in 1858, drawn by "the fire of youth." Unable to serve in the Confederate army because of a disability, he instead helped manage the affairs of soldiers' wives during the Civil War, then built lasting success in farming and stock raising in Navarro County's rich Blackland soil. As a Corsicana civic leader he sold farm machinery, served on the school committee that opened the town's first public schools in 1882, and helped establish the State Orphan Home—so respected that a post office was named "Drane" in his honor.