First Baptist Church of Ovilla
Ovilla, Ellis County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Area residents organized a Baptist church in September 1903. The next year, the community built a wooden tabernacle on Red Oak Creek for use by local churches, including the Baptist congregation, which participated in regular services and revivals. In 1922, the Rev. Bob Burleson became the first full-time pastor for the Baptists. Records are unclear about other early meeting spaces, but in 1936 the congregation built a sanctuary at this site, adding other facilities over time. More than 100 years after its initial organization, First Baptist still serves the community through worship, support and outreach. (2005)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Residents around Ovilla organized a Baptist church in September 1903, worshiping at first in a wooden tabernacle shared with other congregations near Red Oak Creek. The Rev. Bob Burleson became the first full-time pastor in 1922, and in 1936 the members finally built a sanctuary of their own on this site. More than a century on, the congregation still anchors the community through worship and outreach.
Why it matters
The church traces the familiar arc of rural Texas community-building, where a shared brush arbor slowly grew into a permanent house of worship at a town's heart.
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Related people
- · Bob Burleson
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Ovilla
Ovilla, TX
One of Ellis County's oldest communities, Ovilla began in 1844 as a fortified settlement on upper Red Oak Creek, adding a Presbyterian church in 1847 and its first schoolhouse in 1849. By 1900 it boasted a post office, banks, stores, and a cotton gin, serving as a marketing hub for area farmers. Bypassed by the railroads and scarred by fires in 1918 and 1926, the town faded—until suburban growth revived it in later years.
Ovilla Cemetery
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The Ovilla community grew from Peters Colony families who settled here in 1844, and in 1886 Benjamin and Erixna McFarlin deeded four acres to the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, for a burial ground. The earliest marked grave, from 1884, belongs to Rebecca Summers McElroy, and more than 440 people now rest here, among them early settlers and veterans of every American war from the Civil War through Vietnam. The cemetery reads as a roll call of the community's founders.
Shiloh Cumberland Presbyterian Church
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Chartered on July 25, 1847—two years before Ellis County itself existed—Shiloh Cumberland Presbyterian was the county's first organized church. Early worshipers met under a brush arbor and then a cedar log tabernacle built by Matt McElroy and his eight sons. In 1872 the congregation completed the frame sanctuary that still stands, framed with lumber hauled from East Texas.
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Burials at Shiloh began with the Peters Colony pioneers who founded Ovilla in 1844, the oldest marked grave being that of Mary C. Patton, who died in 1851. The Berry family and the Rev. Finis E. King deeded land for the Shiloh Cumberland Presbyterian church and its cemetery, whose stones record the pastors who served the congregation, two nineteenth-century Ovilla postmasters, and veterans from the Civil War through Korea. It is a chronicle of one of North Texas's earliest settlements.