Center City United Methodist Church
Star, Mills County, Texas
Marker Inscription
In the early 1870s, shortly after the founding of Center City (first known as Hughes Store), a circuit riding preacher ministered in the area. Charter members officially formed a Methodist church in 1878. Members first met in the community’s masonic lodge building before completing construction of a facility in 1901. From its early days, the congregation was committed to serving the community. By the 1950s, members partnered with other churches to work with youth and to focus on foreign missions. In 1952, members moved into a new church building. Today, the congregation continues to serve as a spiritual leader in the community of Center City. (2008)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In the young settlement of Center City—first known as Hughes Store—a circuit-riding preacher brought Methodism to the area in the early 1870s, and charter members organized a church in 1878. The congregation first gathered in the Masonic lodge before building its own home in 1901, then a new building in 1952. Through mission work and youth ministry, it has remained a spiritual anchor of this small central Texas community.
Why it matters
It reflects how circuit riders and frontier congregations became the social backbone of newly settled rural Texas, long before towns had much else.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the years just after the Civil War, central Texas was still raw frontier country. The land around what would become Center City—Mills County sits in the rolling hill-and-prairie belt west of the more settled parts of the state—was being opened to farmers and stockmen looking for cheap land and a fresh start. Settlements began not as planned towns but as a store, a crossroads, a name attached to whoever had the goods. Here the first name on the map was simply Hughes Store.
On that kind of frontier, organized religion arrived before almost anything else that resembled civic life. There were no established churches, few schools, and little in the way of local government. What there was, often, was a preacher on horseback. The circuit rider—a Methodist institution carried west from the older states—rode a long loop through scattered cabins and hamlets, holding services wherever people would gather, then moving on to the next stop and returning weeks later.
That is the world this marker remembers: a young settlement in the early 1870s, still finding its footing, where the rhythms of faith were among the first things to give a community shape and a shared calendar.
People & events
The story begins with a preacher whose name the marker does not give—one of the circuit riders who ministered in the area in the early 1870s, when the place was still known by its store. His work laid the groundwork, and in 1878 charter members took the step that made it permanent: they formally organized a Methodist congregation.
Without a building of their own, the new congregation met where the community already gathered—the Masonic lodge. That detail says a great deal about frontier towns, where a single structure often served many purposes and neighbors pooled what little they had. It took until 1901 for the church to complete a building of its own, more than two decades after its founding.
The congregation kept growing and adapting. By the 1950s its members were looking outward, joining with other churches to work with young people and to support foreign missions. In 1952 they moved into a new building—the second home the congregation raised for itself—and carried their work into the modern era.
Its place in the American story
The circuit rider is one of the enduring figures of American westward expansion. As settlement pushed past the edge of established institutions, Methodist and other itinerant preachers followed the people rather than waiting for the people to come to them. They were, for many frontier families, the first regular contact with the wider world beyond their own fields.
What happened in Center City happened in thousands of small places across the growing country. A congregation would form before there was a courthouse or a proper school, meet in a borrowed room, and only later build a sanctuary. The church became more than a place of worship—it was where a scattered population became a community, marking births, marriages, and deaths together.
The long arc here—from a preacher on horseback, to a lodge room, to a building in 1901, to a new one in 1952—is a compact history of how rural America knit itself together. Institutions that began as improvised gatherings matured into the steady anchors of small-town life.
If you visit
Center City is a small central Texas community, and that is exactly the point of stopping here. This is not a grand cathedral but a country church, and its value lies in continuity: a congregation that traces itself back to the 1870s and still serves the same rural crossroads today.
As you stand at the site, picture the sequence the marker lays out—the borrowed lodge room, then the first building finished in 1901, then the 1952 structure. Small country churches often carry these layers, and it is worth noticing what has been kept and what has been rebuilt over more than a century.
If you are traveling the back roads of Mills County, this makes a fitting quiet stop between larger destinations. It rewards the traveler who likes to imagine the people who built a community from almost nothing—starting, as so many did, with a place to gather and a shared faith.
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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Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Center City Baptist Church
Star, TX
As settlers pushed into the rolling country of central Texas after the Civil War, a former blacksmith and Texas Revolution veteran, Noah Turner Byars, gathered a congregation here in 1875 and helped knit it into a new association of frontier Baptist churches. Known first for nearby Bennett Creek, it took the Center City name in a 1901 deed, held summer revivals under a brush arbor into the 1940s, and rebuilt after a 1946 windstorm flattened the frame sanctuary. For generations it doubled as a shared community space and a training ground for deacons and ministers who went on to larger pulpits.
Center City Community
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Settled in 1854 by the Jenkins and Morris families, this Mills County community was first called "Hughes Store" for the couple who opened a shop here in the 1870s. Hopeful founders platted a townsite in 1876 and dreamed of the railroad and the county seat, gathering beneath an ancient live oak long held by tradition to mark the geographic center of Texas. Renamed Center City, the town bustled with stores until the railroad passed it by in 1885; its post office lingered only until 1920.
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