Ebenezer (Third) Baptist Church
Austin, Travis County, Texas
Marker Inscription
The Ebenezer (Third) Baptist Church was organized by Reverend C. Ward, February 1875, in the home of Mrs. Elisa Hawkins at 1104 East Tenth Street. The first frame structure was built at the corner of Catalpa and Curve streets. The membership outgrew this church, and a brick sanctuary with stained glass windows was erected at the corner of East Tenth and San Marcos streets in 1885. In 1915, the stucco tabernacle was erected. The present Sanctuary and Education Complex was erected in 1950-1955. The limestone and brick structure is of Gothic design and the tower houses the bell from the first brick church. Also, a parsonage was built at 1203 Cotton Street.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
The Ebenezer (Third) Baptist Church was organized in February 1875 in the home of Elisa Hawkins, part of the flowering of independent Black congregations across Texas in the years after emancipation. As the membership grew it moved from a simple frame building to a brick sanctuary with stained glass in 1885, a stucco tabernacle in 1915, and finally the Gothic limestone-and-brick complex built in the 1950s, whose tower still holds the bell from the first brick church. The congregation's steady expansion mirrors the deep roots of religious life in East Austin's Black community.
Why it matters
Churches like Ebenezer were the civic and spiritual anchors of African American communities in the post-emancipation South, sustaining generations through Reconstruction and beyond.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
February 1875 places the founding of Ebenezer (Third) Baptist Church in the heart of the Reconstruction era, just a decade after emancipation. Across the South, and here in Austin, formerly enslaved people were building the institutions of free life—and among the very first they built were their own churches. To organize a congregation in these years was an act of self-determination, a declaration that a community would gather, worship, and govern itself on its own terms.
The church was born, fittingly, in a home—the residence of Mrs. Elisa Hawkins on East Tenth Street. Independent Black congregations across Texas often began exactly this way, in parlors and private houses, before they could raise a building of their own. The home church was the seed of the neighborhood church.
East Austin, where Ebenezer took root and grew, became a center of African American life in the city. The steady succession of buildings this congregation raised—frame, then brick, then stucco, then a grand mid-century complex—mirrors the deepening roots of that community across generations of Reconstruction, the Gilded Age, and beyond.
People & events
The congregation was organized by the Reverend C. Ward in February 1875, gathered in the home of Elisa Hawkins on East Tenth Street. From that domestic beginning, the church built its first frame structure at the corner of Catalpa and Curve streets—a plain wooden sanctuary for a young and growing membership.
Growth is the through-line of Ebenezer's story. The membership soon outgrew that first church, and in 1885 the congregation erected a brick sanctuary with stained glass windows at East Tenth and San Marcos streets. In 1915 came a stucco tabernacle, and between 1950 and 1955 the present Sanctuary and Education Complex rose—a limestone and brick building of Gothic design. A parsonage was built on Cotton Street as well.
One detail binds the whole century together beautifully: the tower of the modern complex houses the bell from the first brick church. The congregation carried that bell forward through every rebuilding, so that the voice of the 1885 sanctuary still sounds from the twentieth-century tower—continuity you can hear as much as see.
Its place in the American story
In the post-emancipation South, the Black church was far more than a place of worship. It was the community's civic center, its schoolhouse, its meeting hall, and its safest gathering place—an institution owned and led by African Americans at a time when so much else was denied them. Ebenezer's long life is a local instance of that national truth.
The congregation's arc from a private home in 1875 to a substantial Gothic complex in the 1950s traces the endurance and aspiration of Black religious life across the hardest decades of American history—through Reconstruction, its collapse, and the long era of segregation that followed. Each new and larger building was a statement of permanence in the face of forces that would have preferred otherwise.
Churches like this anchored African American neighborhoods and nurtured the leaders, networks, and moral confidence that would matter enormously in the generations to come. To stand before Ebenezer is to stand before one of the foundational institutions of Black American community life.
If you visit
Come to Ebenezer in East Austin to read a full century of a community's life in stone and brick. The present Gothic-style limestone-and-brick complex, built in the early 1950s, is the culmination of a long climb from a single room in a private home—so let your eye appreciate not just the building in front of you, but the four sanctuaries of ambition it represents.
Look to the tower, and know that it holds the bell from the congregation's first brick church of 1885. That's the detail to carry with you: a single object passed down through every rebuilding, still ringing out over the neighborhood it has served for well over a century.
If you're tracing African American heritage through Austin, Ebenezer belongs on the route as one of the enduring anchors of East Austin's Black community. Read the marker, take in the Gothic lines, and give a thought to the winter day in 1875 when a handful of people gathered in Elisa Hawkins's home and began something that still stands today.
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
- · C. Ward
- · Elisa Hawkins
Themes & tags
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