First Baptist Church of Judson
Longview, Gregg County, Texas
Marker Inscription
In the 1870s the people of this community met in the Lawrenceville School for Christian worship services. Thirteen local Baptists organized their own church in 1883, continuing to meet in the school building. Founding member Georgia Whatley suggested the name Judson Missionary Baptist Church for a church she had attended in Lawrenceville, Alabama which was named in honor of Adoniram Judson (1788-1850), America's first foreign missionary. In 1886, the Judson Missionary Baptist Church began to support mission work. Members began to plan for their own house of worship in 1891. Georgia and Hiram Whatley donated a plot of land, and the structure was erected in 1894. Baptismal services were conducted in the creek east of the church after the yearly summer revival had taken place. The baptisms later were held on a member's property and then at nearby Whitehurst Lake. In the late 1890s H. A. Whatley gave one acre for a cemetery. Sunday School began in 1901, a Ladies' Auxiliary was formed in 1902, and the Baptist Young People's Union was organized at the Judson Church in 1924. A new church building was erected in 1935, and the church was able to hire its first full-time pastor in 1941. By 1900 Public School District No. 2, Gregg County, was known as Judson. In 1952, a U. S. Post Office opened in the community, taking the name Judson. The membership, many of them descendants of the pioneers of this part of Gregg County, numbered more than 260 in 1998. The congregation continues to be active in mission work and in service to the community of Judson. (1998)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In the 1870s settlers in this corner of Gregg County gathered for worship in the Lawrenceville School, and in 1883 thirteen Baptists organized their own congregation, naming it for pioneer American missionary Adoniram Judson. They built their first meeting house in 1894, holding baptisms in a nearby creek, and by 1900 the surrounding school district — and later the town and post office — had all taken the Judson name. Anchored by founding families like the Whatleys, the church grew into the enduring heart of the community.
Why it matters
The Judson church shows how a frontier congregation could become the seed of an entire community, lending its name to the school, town, and post office that grew up around it.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Georgia Whatley
- · Adoniram Judson
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Elmira Chapel Cumberland Presbyterian Church
Longview, TX
This East Texas congregation grew out of Sunday School classes that Pine Tree Cumberland Presbyterian Church began holding in the Spring Hill Schoolhouse in the late 1880s. Organized in the 1890s under its first resident pastor, the church took its name from Elmira Castleberry, matriarch of a prominent pioneer family whose sons served as founding elders and donated land and materials for a combined school and church building in 1897-98. The congregation remained active in community and missionary work for generations.
Gladewater Lodge No. 852, A.F. & A.M.
Gladewater, TX
On the eve of the twentieth century, twenty master masons — many from the Longview lodge — petitioned to form their own fraternal lodge, chartered in December 1901 with Daniel Washington Wood as first Worshipful Master. For three decades members met above James Ponder's general store, and their ranks included leading Gladewater businessmen, clergy, and civic figures, among them Dr. Earl McLaughlin, who won national notice for a remedy devised during the 1918 influenza epidemic. In 1940 the lodge dedicated its own hall, long a fixture of the town's civic life through scholarships and community programs.
Pleasant Green Baptist Church
Longview, TX
After emancipation, freedpeople established the community of Pleasant Green, and in December 1871 pastors Henry Moses and Charles Anderson helped local residents organize a Baptist congregation, with the Rev. Henry Mass as its first pastor. From a small farm the church moved to this site in 1884 on land deeded by Simon and Mealy Claiborn, raising a frame sanctuary and later a larger house of worship. It remains a center of the historic African American community.
Bishop College
Marshall, TX
Founded in 1881 by the Baptist Home Mission Society, Bishop College became Marshall's second historically Black college, funded by New York educator Nathan Bishop, his wife Caroline, and local Baptist ministers. Over the decades it taught more than twenty disciplines and trained ministers, and it fielded championship athletic teams. Martin Luther King Jr. addressed its 1960 commencement, and its students joined the sit-ins of the civil rights era before the campus relocated to Dallas; the school closed in 1988.