East Shady Grove Baptist Church
Leonard, Fannin County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Organized Oct. 26, 1884, by 18 members who met at nearby school to found a missionary Baptist church. T. P. Reece was the first of 25 pastors here. The Sunday School was founded Feb. 22, 1885. Dedication of present church was July 16, 1911.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Eighteen members meeting in a nearby schoolhouse organized East Shady Grove Baptist Church in October 1884, calling T. P. Reece as the first of many pastors. A Sunday school followed in early 1885, and the congregation dedicated its permanent church building in 1911. The steady growth mirrors the maturing of rural Fannin County.
Why it matters
Frontier congregations like this one were the cornerstone institutions that gave scattered farming settlements a shared civic and social life.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · T. P. Reece
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Blanton Chapel Methodist Church
Leonard, TX
This supplemental plaque records the founding of Blanton Chapel in 1872 by Benjamin J. Blanton, one of the countless Methodist congregations that took root across rural North Texas during Reconstruction. Small chapels like this served scattered farming families as centers of worship and community in the decades after the Civil War. The marker preserves the memory of the chapel's origin and its namesake founder near Leonard in Fannin County.
Lee Cemetery
Celeste, TX
This burial ground took shape around 1860, in the years when families were still carving farms and communities out of the North Texas blackland prairie of Hunt County. A rural cemetery like this one served scattered settlers as both a resting place and a fixed point of community memory, long before the surrounding towns had churches or courthouses of their own. Its later designation as a Historic Texas Cemetery recognizes that continuity across more than a century of local life.
Dr. William Chamberlayne Jones
Leonard, TX
An Alabama native, William Chamberlayne Jones came to Texas in 1852 and settled near Monkstown in northeastern Fannin County. Trained as a lawyer, he sold his Red River plantation after the Civil War, studied medicine in New Orleans, and spent his later years doctoring the Grove Hill and Leonard communities while raising fifteen children with his wife Ellen.
Leonard
Leonard, TX
Settlers reached this corner of Fannin County in the 1840s and 50s, among them Solomon L. Leonard, a Confederate sympathizer who amassed 10,000 acres around Wildcat Thicket — a tangle of brush where fugitives and outlaws, and figures of the bloody Reconstruction-era Lee-Peacock feud, took cover. When the Missouri, Kansas & Texas Railroad arrived in 1880, Leonard's heirs platted a townsite and auctioned lots at a picnic on this very square, an event still held every year. A saloon, hotel, post office, newspaper, and school followed, and Leonard became the market town of a rich farming district.