First Baptist Church of Del Rio

🏛️The era

Del Rio in the 1890s was a young town on the edge of the nation. It sat beside abundant springs just north of the Rio Grande, in country that had long been home to Indigenous peoples and later to Spanish and Mexican settlers. When the railroad pushed across southwest Texas in the early 1880s, linking San Antonio to points west, the little community suddenly found itself on a transcontinental line.

Railroads did more than move freight. They brought crews, section workers, depot agents and their families, many of whom lived in temporary or isolated conditions along the tracks. Towns grew up around water stops and division points, and churches, schools and social life followed, often a step or two behind.

That is the world where Del Rio's First Baptist Church began. Across the late nineteenth century, American Protestant denominations organized home missions to follow the rails west. They sent preachers and teachers to places where no congregation yet existed, and sometimes they used inventive tools to get there.

👥People & events

On May 24, 1896, Pastor Frank Marrs joined the Rev. and Mrs. Edwin S. Stucker as founding members of a new Baptist church in Del Rio. Marrs came trained from the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kentucky. The Stuckers were missionaries with a remarkable workplace: a railway car named Goodwill, sponsored by the American Baptist Sunday School Society of Philadelphia, from which they ministered to railroad workers and their families.

Picture it: a rail car rolling into a dusty siding and becoming, for a time, a church, a classroom and a place of welcome for people far from home. From that mobile beginning, the congregation formally organized with just six charter members.

As Del Rio grew, the church did too. A land donation let members move into an adobe building at the southwest corner of Garfield and Pecan streets. That material suited the dry borderland climate and its building traditions. On February 17, 1925, they laid the cornerstone of a brick and stone sanctuary on the same site, and it served them for 35 years.

In 1960 the congregation moved to a new building on Avenue G, outside downtown, and brought the old cornerstone along. The church kept growing. It added classroom buildings and acquired land around the region to plant new congregations, including the ones that became El Buen Pastor and Northside Baptist. A fire destroyed early church records, but the congregation's sense of its own story survived the flames.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

The Goodwill rail car connects this small borderland church to one of the more creative chapters in American religious history. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, several denominations put rolling chapels into service so they could reach railroad towns that had no church buildings yet. It is a reminder that the railroads carried ideas, institutions and faith communities west along with people and goods.

The church's story also traces a familiar American pattern of town-building. A congregation moves from a mission car to adobe, then to brick and stone, and then out from downtown to a new neighborhood in the postwar years. That arc mirrors how countless towns grew, prospered and spread outward during the twentieth century.

Finally, the founding of a congregation named El Buen Pastor points to the bicultural character of the Texas border. Communities like Del Rio have long been places where English and Spanish, and the traditions behind each language, live side by side. Their institutions have grown in ways that reflect that.

🧭If you visit

Del Rio sits on a long, scenic stretch of southwest Texas highway, and it makes a rewarding stop for travelers heading toward the Hill Country, Big Bend country or the shores of Amistad National Recreation Area. The town's springs and its old downtown give it a character all its own.

If you stop by the church, look for the 1925 cornerstone that the congregation carried with them in 1960. It is a small, tangible link between the old downtown sanctuary and the present. If you are exploring downtown, you can also think about the corner of Garfield and Pecan, where the adobe church and later the brick and stone sanctuary once stood.

Remember that this is an active congregation, so be respectful of services and private spaces. Pair your visit with a stroll through the town's historic district and a moment by the railroad, the reason Del Rio, and this church, became what they are.