Christoval Baptist Church
Christoval, Tom Green County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Settlement of this area began in the 1860s and increased in the 1870s and 1880s following the establishment of Fort Concho in nearby San Angelo. The town of Christoval began to develop by 1885. The South Concho Baptist congregation was organized in 1889 with four charter members. The Rev. T. R. Leggett served as first pastor, and the congregation met in the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, built by a group of citizens and used as a Union Church. Located on a hill on the corner of present Church St and Rudd, the Union Church was the site of regular worship services, with various clergy officiating. The name of the South Concho Baptist congregation was changed to Christoval Baptist Church in 1906. Four years later the membership voted to build its own facility, and an octagonal wooden tabernacle was erected. In 1911, the first annual summer Christoval Baptist encampment was held on the banks of the South Concho River. A new church building was dedicated in 1925 during the August camp meeting. Due to the financial strains of the Depression, the campground was sold in 1932. This church remains an important part of the Christoval community. (1989)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Settlement quickened around the South Concho after Fort Concho was established near San Angelo, and by 1885 the town of Christoval had begun to take shape. A Baptist congregation organized in 1889 worshipped first in a shared Union Church, then in an octagonal wooden tabernacle, and launched an annual riverside summer encampment in 1911 that became a fixture until the Depression forced the campground's sale in 1932.
Why it matters
The congregation's story reflects how frontier forts drew settlers whose churches and camp meetings anchored community life across the ranching country of West Texas.
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Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Christoval
Christoval, TX
Frontiersmen began filtering into the south Concho Valley in the 1870s, following the 'Toe Nail' trail between Fort McKavett and Fort Concho. By the mid-1880s a settlement took shape with a Union Church and an irrigation company that dammed the river to water dry farmland. Storekeeper Christopher C. Doty applied for a post office in 1888, proposing 'Christobal' after his own name — Spanish for Christopher — which arrived misspelled as Christoval, the name that stuck. Mineral wells, a Baptist campground that hosted Confederate reunions, and the arrival of the railroad in 1930 shaped the town that followed.
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From 1894 to 1909 this corner of the old Mark Fury Ranch served as a stagecoach stop on Theodore Jackson Savell's line between San Angelo and Sonora. Six mornings a week a horn announced the stage's arrival, carrying passengers, mail, and express across country so remote that the line was, as the marker puts it, a thread of life for the region.
Knickerbocker
Knickerbocker, TX
Drawn by Dove Creek's water and irrigable land, farmers and stockmen settled this West Texas valley in the 1870s, beginning with the Baze brothers' 1875 irrigation ditch dug to supply nearby Fort Concho. In 1877 New York sheepmen named their ranch—and later the town—for Washington Irving's character Diedrich Knickerbocker, and by 1890 the community boasted stores, hotels, churches, and schools. Like many rural West Texas towns, it faded as automobiles and better roads pulled residents toward San Angelo.
Christopher Columbus Doty
Eldorado, TX
Christopher Columbus Doty (1857–1944) came to Texas from Missouri in 1879 and soon claimed the headquarters at Ten-Mile Water Hole, becoming the first permanent citizen of what would become Schleicher County. In 1882 he drilled the county's first water well and raised the first windmill south of the Concho River — the kind of innovation that unlocked ranching and farming across the arid West Texas plains. When the county organized in 1901, his land was included and he was elected its first tax assessor-collector.