First Baptist Church of Kountze
Kountze, Hardin County, Texas
Marker Inscription
The Baptist Church of Hardin was organized in 1860 with Pastor D. W. Jordan. When the railroad bypassed Hardin (then the county seat) in 1881, area residents began moving to nearby Kountze. Hardin Baptists are believed to have followed, probably meeting in a multi-denominational building known as the first house of worship in Kountze erected in 1887. Southern Baptist Convention records list the origin of the Baptist Church of Kountze in 1890; the congregation declared itself in 1893 under Pastor J. W. Rhodes. In 1908 a loan from the Southern Baptist Convention to the First Baptist Church of Kountze facilitated the erection of a frame structure on Redwood Street. It was located two blocks from the original building, which had become the Methodist Church. In 1951 fundraising and planning began for a new brick building, dedicated in 1955. By 1979, a two-story wing was added; in the 1980s the church library and sanctuary were expanded and new youth programs established. The First Baptist Church of Kountze marked its 100th anniversary with a celebration lasting from the spring of 1990 to January of 1993. With such developments as a new fellowship hall added in 1997, the church continues to serve the community. (1998)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
The Baptist Church of Hardin organized in 1860, but when the railroad bypassed the county-seat town of Hardin in 1881, its people drifted to booming Kountze nearby. There they helped fill the town's first multi-denominational house of worship, formally organizing as a Kountze congregation by the 1890s. A 1908 loan from the Southern Baptist Convention funded the first frame church, beginning a century of steady growth.
Why it matters
The church's migration shows how a single railroad routing decision could drain one town and swell another, redrawing the map of settlement across rural Texas.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · D. W. Jordan
- · J. W. Rhodes
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
First United Methodist Church of Kountze
Kountze, TX
In the 1880s the Texas and New Orleans Railroad opened up the Big Thicket country of Hardin County, and the new town of Kountze grew up along the tracks, capturing the county seat from nearby Hardin in 1886. As settlers arrived, the Rev. James S. Murphy gathered a Methodist congregation that laid the cornerstone of the town's first church in 1888, a sanctuary shared by worshippers of every denomination. Served for years by circuit-riding ministers, the congregation grew into a full charge with its own pastor by 1940 and a new sanctuary in 1951.
Old Hardin
Kountze, TX
Founded in 1859 as the first seat of newly created Hardin County, Old Hardin thrived until the Sabine & East Texas Railroad bypassed it in 1881, a fatal turn for many 19th-century towns. A suspicious fire destroyed its courthouse in 1886, and the next year voters moved the county seat to Kountze, which sat on the rail line. Old Hardin faded as the railroad town rose in its place.
Richard E. Jackson
Kountze, TX
Richard E. Jackson grew up in a family mercantile business and made his career on the East Texas railroads, carrying freight to the sawmills and oilfields that were transforming the region in the early twentieth century. Alarmed that logging and oil exploration threatened the wild Big Thicket he loved, he leased more than 18,000 acres and, beginning in 1929, organized the associations and field studies that rallied support for preserving it. Though the Depression and World War II undid his first efforts, his vision led decades later to the creation of a national preserve.
Hardin-Concord Road
Lumberton, TX
In use from about 1859 to 1900, the Hardin-Concord Road was one of the oldest overland routes in the area, carrying wagon and horseback travelers between early settlements. It linked Hardin, the first Hardin County seat, with Concord, the southernmost point steamboats could reach on the Neches River by way of Pine Island Bayou—joining land and water travel into a single network. Traces of the old road can still be followed where modern U.S. Highway 69 now crosses its path.