First Baptist Church of Alvarado
Alvarado, Johnson County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Settlers came to Alvarado in the 1850s, and area Baptists are believed to have gathered for several years before formally organizing a church on October 6, 1861. Members first met at the community's Union Building, shared by a school and three other denominations. Bro. William C. Gentry served as the first pastor of the group, which recruited new members with revival meetings in nearby Willow Springs. The Alvarado congregation moved into its own sanctuary in 1877. Over the years, it has built new facilities, relocating here at the turn of the 21st century. It continues efforts to serve the community through a variety of programs. (2004)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Baptists around Alvarado, settled in the 1850s, gathered informally for years before formally organizing their church on October 6, 1861, at the outbreak of the Civil War. Sharing the community's Union Building with a school and other denominations, the congregation grew through revival meetings and moved into its own sanctuary in 1877.
Why it matters
Congregations like this were among the first institutions frontier Texans built, providing the schooling, fellowship, and stability that turned raw settlements into lasting towns.
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Related people
- · William C. Gentry
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Alvarado
Alvarado, TX
Alvarado grew from David Mitchell's late-1840s trading post as colonists of the Peters empresario grant settled the area. William Balch, the "Father of Alvarado," had the townsite surveyed in 1854 and donated land for a cemetery, school, and union church; the town was named for Alvarado, Mexico. The arrival of two railroads in 1881 and 1884 sparked a boom, and by 1885 Alvarado boasted churches, schools, gins, an opera house, a bank, a newspaper, and about 2,000 residents. Its community school evolved from the 1875 Masonic Institute into Alvarado High School by 1908–09.
Outlaws Benjamin Bickerstaff and Josiah Thompson
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In the unsettled years after the Civil War, this stretch of Johnson County was plagued by outlaws, among them Benjamin Bickerstaff, a former Confederate soldier wanted for murder in Louisiana, and his associate Josiah Thompson. When the pair rode into Alvarado on April 5, 1869, organized townspeople shot them dead. Both were buried in the old Alvarado cemetery.
First Methodist Church
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This Methodist congregation took root in Alvarado, the Johnson County town William Balch founded in 1851, holding its earliest services in a hall he had built. Its first church went up in 1866 and burned in 1885, but the community rebuilt the following year in a Victorian style of spire and lancet windows that still stands, later enlarged by mid-20th-century annexes. Remarkably, the church still rings its original bell.
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In the 1870s, two pioneer families — the Campbells and the Sansoms — buried their dead on a rise of North Texas prairie, the earliest a seven-month-old child laid to rest in 1876. When the railroad reached Alvarado in 1881, newcomers poured in and buried their own kin beside those first family plots, and by 1896 the Knights of Pythias and Odd Fellows had added lodge burial grounds. During the Great Depression the city took over care of the combined grounds, known ever since as Glenwood Cemetery.