Button Memorial United Methodist Church
Denton, Denton County, Texas
Marker Inscription
The Rev. William E. Bates, a native of Virginia, established the Methodist congregation at Little Elm in 1853. Members shared a meetinghouse with other denominations at John House Springs and in 1916 built their own facility. In the 1950s, the church moved to make way for construction of Lewisville Lake. In 1962, a descendant of early Little Elm settlers and church members George and Sarah Button donated funds for a new sanctuary; members renamed the church in honor of the Button family. Throughout its history, the church has been active in its community, offering a variety of services and programs to members and area residents. (2006)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
When the Rev. William E. Bates gathered a Methodist congregation at Little Elm in 1853, north Texas was still thinly settled prairie, and worshippers made do with a shared meetinghouse before raising their own in 1916. The building's story took an unusual turn in the 1950s, when the rising waters of the new Lewisville Lake forced the whole church to relocate. A 1962 gift from a descendant of the pioneer Button family funded a fresh sanctuary and gave the congregation its present name.
Why it matters
The church's forced move for a federal reservoir captures how mid-century water and flood-control projects reshaped countless small Texas communities, relocating even their churchyards.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
When the Rev. William E. Bates gathered a handful of Methodist worshippers at Little Elm in 1853, this stretch of north Texas was still raw prairie country. Texas had been a state for less than a decade, and the land between the forks of the Trinity was thinly settled — a place of scattered farms, cattle, and long distances between neighbors. Churches out here were as much about community as creed; a congregation was often the first institution a frontier settlement built, sometimes before it had a school or a store.
In those early years the Methodists shared space rather than owning it. Worshippers met at a common meetinghouse at John House Springs, a practical arrangement on the frontier, where several denominations pooled their few resources into one building. Sunday might bring different preachers on different weeks, and the roof over everyone's head was more important than whose name was on the door.
By 1916, the congregation had grown settled and confident enough to raise a facility of its own. That was a milestone repeated across rural Texas in the early twentieth century, as pioneer-era arrangements gave way to permanent, single-congregation buildings — a sign that a community had put down roots and meant to stay.
People & events
The story begins with William E. Bates, a Virginia-born Methodist who organized the Little Elm congregation in 1853. Preachers like Bates were the connective tissue of frontier faith, often riding long circuits to reach far-flung settlers. That he planted a lasting congregation here says something about both his persistence and the community's hunger for a spiritual home.
For generations the church simply endured — sharing a meetinghouse, then building its own in 1916, always tied to the farming families around Little Elm. Its most dramatic chapter came in the 1950s, when the church had to pick up and move to make way for the construction of Lewisville Lake. Few congregations expect to be uprooted by an engineering project, yet the whole church had to find new ground.
The congregation's rescue and rebirth came through the Button family. In 1962, a descendant of George and Sarah Button — pioneer Little Elm settlers and church members — donated the funds for a new sanctuary. In gratitude, the members renamed the church in the family's honor, folding the memory of its earliest members into the identity of the rebuilt congregation. It's a quiet act of continuity: a nineteenth-century family name carried forward into a twentieth-century building.
Its place in the American story
The forced relocation of this church is a small window onto one of the largest reshapings of the American landscape. In the mid-twentieth century, the federal government built a wave of dams and reservoirs for flood control, water supply, and recreation, and those rising waters displaced countless farms, roads, cemeteries, and communities. Behind every new lake on the map was a story of people asked to move.
Texas was transformed by this era of water projects. Reservoirs like Lewisville Lake turned river bottoms into shorelines and gave fast-growing cities a dependable water supply — but they also erased or relocated the older rural world that had occupied those valleys. Churches, being anchors of community, were among the institutions most poignantly affected.
What makes this marker resonate nationally is that the congregation did not simply disappear. It moved, rebuilt, and renamed itself, carrying its history across the water line intact. That pattern — displacement followed by renewal — is the human counterpart to the engineering, and it played out in hundreds of communities across the country during the great dam-building decades.
If you visit
Coming to this site near Denton, you're standing with a congregation that has literally outlived its own geography — the ground where its earlier building stood is part of a different landscape now. Let that sink in as you look around: the church you see is the one made possible by the Button family's 1962 gift, a fresh start rather than the original structure.
Think of the layers of names tied to this one place: Bates the founder, Little Elm the mother community, and the Buttons whose memory the church now carries. A marker like this rewards a slow read and a moment's imagination of the older meetinghouse days at John House Springs, when several faiths shared one roof.
This makes a natural stop on a north Texas drive that ties together small-town history and the big recreational lakes nearby. If your route takes you toward Lewisville Lake itself, you'll be traveling over the very reason this congregation had to move — a reminder that the water and the church share a single story.
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
- · Rev. William E. Bates
- · George Button
- · Sarah Button
Related events
- · Construction of Lewisville Lake
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Community of Little Elm
Little Elm, TX
Little Elm sits on land from the Peters Colony, an empresario grant the Republic of Texas awarded in 1841 to lure settlers to its northern frontier. Among the first were John and Delilah King, who came from North Carolina in 1844; their son "Kit" King helped organize the area's first mail service and became postmaster when the Little Elm post office opened in 1852. Formed from a cluster of small settlements, the town might have faded—but the creation of Lake Dallas in the 1920s and Lake Lewisville in the 1950s, plus nearby Dallas–Fort Worth, drove it to grow and incorporate in 1966.
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