First Baptist Church of Gilmer
Gilmer, Upshur County, Texas
Marker Inscription
First congregation was organized in a log cabin in 1846 as the Gilmer Missionary Baptist Church of Christ. In 1854 the congregation consisted of 22 members and the Rev. J. M. Griffin served as pastor. Church membership grew to 100 in 1869 and in the early 1870s the first church building was erected about one block north of this site. Walter Grimmer organized the first Sunday School in 1878. A Ladies Aid Society was organized in 1895 and in 1896 a new brick sanctuary was erected. The first full-time pastor, the Rev. J. L. Mahan, was called in 1904. The congregation purchased land here in 1909 and in 1911 a new sanctuary containing their first baptistry was erected. That year the church, with a membership of 410, became a charter member of the Pittsburg Baptist Association. A parsonage was built here in 1918 and an education building in 1925. The church was renamed First Baptist Church of Gilmer in 1929. Over the years the church has remodeled existing structures and added new buildings to its property to serve its growing congregation. The congregation has grown with the community and continues to support missionary activities and serve the area with a variety of outreach programs. Sesquicentennial of Texas Statehood 1845-1995
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
This Baptist congregation began in a log cabin in 1846, the year Texas joined the Union, as the Gilmer Missionary Baptist Church of Christ. Over the following decades it grew from a couple dozen members into hundreds, erecting successive buildings, adding a Sunday School and a Ladies Aid Society, and calling its first full-time pastor in 1904. Renamed First Baptist Church of Gilmer in 1929, it has grown alongside its Upshur County town ever since.
Why it matters
Its long arc, from frontier log cabin to established congregation, mirrors the settlement and steady maturing of East Texas from the earliest days of statehood.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Rev. J. M. Griffin
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Ragland Clinic-Hospital
Gilmer, TX
In 1933 Dr. Thomas Scott Ragland and his physician sons opened Upshur County's first full-time hospital on Cass Street in Gilmer, serving as physicians, railroad surgeons, and civic leaders. The clinic-hospital expanded repeatedly across the following decades and, amid the nursing shortages of World War II, ran a licensed vocational nursing program to train and retain staff. Renamed as new doctors joined, it remained the county's only general medical facility until it closed in 1981.
The Looney School
Gilmer, TX
Through the turbulent Civil War decade, Morgan H. Looney ran a school in Gilmer whose reputation for rigor drew boarding students from across East Texas. With separate entrances and study halls for boys and girls and monthly socials to break the discipline, the academy became a nursery for Texas leadership. Its alumni and teachers went on to become governors, a state supreme court chief justice, and a U.S. senator.
First United Methodist Church of Gilmer
Gilmer, TX
Gilmer's early settlers found Baptists and Methodists sharing the county's log courthouse for services by 1849, and a Methodist circuit rider soon organized a Sunday school and congregation that was chartered around 1852. The church founded separate men's and women's academies in the mid-1850s, schools that ran until they closed in 1862 amid the Civil War. Education remained central to the congregation as it grew, building ever-larger sanctuaries into the twentieth century.
Gilgal Baptist Church
Gilmer, TX
Founded in 1865 as the Civil War ended, this Black Baptist congregation began under a brush arbor and took the biblical name "Gilgal," the Israelites' first camp in the Promised Land — a fitting choice for a people newly freed. Over the following decades its members raised a frame church, ran a Black school on donated land, and, under Rev. W. L. Dickson, opened the Dickson Colored Orphans Home. The brick-veneered sanctuary and educational annex trace a congregation that steadily built institutions of faith, learning, and care.