First Baptist Church of Midland
Midland, Midland County, Texas
Marker Inscription
The First Baptist Church of Midland began serving the city shortly after Midland's founding in 1885. That year, Baptists from Pecos, Big Spring and Midland agreed to hire the Rev. S.B. Callaway to serve the three congregations. Under his leadership, a group organized this church in 1886, erecting a building shortly afterwards. Over the years, the church expanded and moved twice to accommodate growing membership. During the years following World War II, church growth mirrored Midland's impressive city development due to the region's expanding petroleum industry. Through all this time, the church has been a spiritual and community leader, a position it continues to hold today. (2006)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Soon after Midland's founding in 1885, Baptists from Pecos, Big Spring, and Midland pooled their resources to hire the Rev. S.B. Callaway to serve all three towns, and under him this congregation organized in 1886 and quickly built its first house of worship. As Midland grew—especially with the petroleum boom that followed World War II—the church expanded and relocated to keep pace. It has remained a spiritual and civic anchor of the city ever since.
Why it matters
The church's growth mirrors the rise of Midland from a railroad watering stop into a capital of the West Texas oil economy.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
Midland was born of the railroad. In 1885, as rail lines pushed across the West Texas plains, a townsite took shape roughly midway along the route — a name that reflected its position and a settlement typical of the era of westward expansion, when new towns bloomed wherever the tracks and the water stops decreed.
The Reconstruction and Gilded Age years were a time of rapid town-building across the American West, and with the settlers came their institutions. On the frontier, a church was often among the first things a community organized, providing not only worship but a center of social life in an isolated country.
Midland's Baptists moved quickly. The very year the town was founded, congregations across a wide stretch of West Texas were already making plans to bring a minister to the new settlements.
People & events
In 1885, Baptists from Pecos, Big Spring, and Midland — three young towns strung across a vast and thinly settled land — agreed together to hire the Rev. S.B. Callaway to serve all three congregations. It was a frontier solution to a frontier problem: too few people and too much distance for any one town to support a full-time pastor alone.
Under Callaway's leadership, a group organized the First Baptist Church of Midland in 1886 and put up a building shortly afterward. From that modest start the congregation grew alongside the town, expanding and relocating twice over the years to make room for more members.
The church's steepest growth came after World War II, when the surrounding region's petroleum industry turned Midland into a booming city. As the town swelled, so did the congregation, the two rising together.
Its place in the American story
The story of this church is, in miniature, the story of how the American West was settled and sustained. Churches traveled with the frontier, often organized before a town had much else, and they knit scattered newcomers into communities. The arrangement that founded this one — three towns pooling their resources for a single circuit-serving minister — was a pattern repeated across the whole expanding West.
Midland's later chapter belongs to a different great American saga: the twentieth-century oil economy. The petroleum boom that followed World War II transformed a former railroad watering stop into a capital of the West Texas oil country, and the church's postwar growth mirrored that rise directly.
In one congregation's timeline you can read two defining American movements — the railroad-era settlement of the West, and the oil-driven prosperity that remade it decades later.
If you visit
Midland today is a modern city, and part of the pleasure of seeking out this history is realizing how recent its frontier beginnings really are — a town founded in 1885 that a single long lifetime could nearly span.
Use the marker as a lens for the city around you. Picture the sequence it describes: a first small building in the 1880s, then relocations and expansions as the membership grew, each move a marker of the town's own growth from railroad stop to oil city.
On a West Texas road trip, this church makes a good starting point for understanding Midland's character. Pair it with the region's oil-heritage sites, and you'll see how the community's spiritual and civic roots and its petroleum-fueled prosperity grew from the same ground.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Rev. S.B. Callaway
Related events
- · Founding of Midland (1885)
Themes & tags
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