First Baptist Church of Poteet
Poteet, Atascosa County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Prior to 1856, settlers around Gallinas gathered on Sundays in each others’ homes to worship the Lord. As numbers grew, they met at Shiloh at a log building used for school and church on Borrego Creek. Seminary student William Dycks Johnson (1838-1885) is credited with starting Shiloh Baptist Church during a hiatus from Baylor University. The church organized in June 1856 with ten members at the organizational meeting. Samuel Ellis Pearce was pastor in 1859. By the early 1900s, Shiloh Baptist Church outgrew their building and looked for a larger facility to house Sunday school classes. A committee met with another historic congregation, Gates Valley Baptist Church, to discuss the option of merging churches. In Jan. 1913, the churches agreed, and the Gates Valley building was moved to Poteet. It was placed on a corner lot on Avenue E donated by the Town Site Company of Poteet. The sanctuary’s large space was divided into rooms by hanging quilts made by women of the church. James Wesley yow was called as the first pastor to lead First Baptist Church of Poteet in late 1913. The church grew in its early years, bolstered by a Baptist training union under direction of Mrs. T. F. Bledsoe and Sunday School under leadership of Brother O. N. Crouch. Seeing that a larger building was needed, members voted in 1936 to relocate, buying six lots at 4th Street and Avenue D. Some lumber from the former church was used in the new building. In 1943, the church bought a home belonging to Mrs. Katy L. Bevins for a parsonage. Expansions and renovations have updated the campus to meet the needs of the congregation. First Baptist Church of Poteet has fostered the spiritual development of its members and neighbors through community outreach and church planting such as the Spanish speaking mission program that started Hosanna Baptist Church.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Settlers around Gallinas first worshiped in one another's homes before gathering at a Borrego Creek log building that served as both school and church. In June 1856 ten members organized Shiloh Baptist Church, credited to seminary student William Dycks Johnson; decades later, in 1913, Shiloh merged with Gates Valley Baptist and moved the building to Poteet, dividing its sanctuary into rooms with hanging quilts. Renamed First Baptist Church of Poteet, it grew through the 20th century and planted new congregations.
Why it matters
The church's story captures how frontier faith communities pooled scarce resources—sharing buildings, merging congregations, and sewing quilt walls—to sustain worship on the South Texas frontier.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the years before 1856, the settlers scattered around Gallinas in South Texas lived far from any established church. Sunday worship began the way it so often did on the frontier — in one another's homes, wherever a family could gather neighbors around scripture and song.
This was thinly settled country, and buildings did double duty out of necessity. As the group grew, they moved into a log building on Borrego Creek that served both as a school during the week and a church on Sundays. A single roof for learning and worship was not a compromise; it was simply how a young community made the most of what it had.
The congregation's long life would stretch across enormous change in Texas — from the frontier decades through the turn of the century and into the modern era of towns, railroads, and automobiles. Its story is a thread of continuity running the whole length of that transformation.
People & events
The church that would become First Baptist of Poteet traces its roots to Shiloh Baptist Church, credited to William Dycks Johnson, a seminary student who is said to have started it during a break from his studies at Baylor. The congregation organized in June 1856 with ten members present at that first meeting, and by 1859 Samuel Ellis Pearce was serving as pastor.
Decades later the little church had outgrown its building. In a striking act of frontier practicality, a committee met with a second congregation, Gates Valley Baptist Church, to discuss merging. In January 1913 the two agreed, and the Gates Valley building itself was physically moved to Poteet and set on a donated corner lot. Inside, the sanctuary's open space was divided into Sunday-school rooms by hanging quilts sewn by the women of the church — walls of cloth for a growing congregation.
James Wesley Yow was called as the first pastor of the newly named First Baptist Church of Poteet in late 1913. The church grew in its early years, aided by a Baptist training union and a Sunday school under dedicated lay leaders, and later generations bought lots, raised new buildings, and even carried lumber from the old church into the new.
Its place in the American story
The frontier church is one of the quiet foundations of American community life, and this congregation shows exactly how it worked. Faith communities on the edge of settlement pooled scarce resources in every way they could — sharing a single building with the schoolhouse, merging two struggling congregations into one stronger body, and improvising a partition wall out of homemade quilts.
That last detail is the kind of thing that makes local history vivid: the women's needlework literally shaped the space where a town prayed and its children learned. It's a reminder that the great institutions of American religious life were built, very often, by hand and by the labor of people whose names rarely reach the history books.
The congregation's later mission work — including a Spanish-speaking program that helped start another church — connects this small Texas town to a much larger American pattern, in which established congregations became seedbeds for new ones, and faith spread through planting rather than proclamation.
If you visit
Poteet sits in the South Texas brush country, and this church is best appreciated as a living institution with unusually deep roots — a congregation that can trace its gathering back to home worship before the town itself took shape.
As you read the marker, hold onto the small, human images it preserves: the log building shared with the schoolhouse on Borrego Creek, and a whole church building lifted and hauled to a new lot in 1913. Picture the sanctuary divided not by walls but by quilts, and you'll have the feel of how much was made from how little.
It's a fine stop for anyone interested in how faith and community took hold on the Texas frontier. You don't need to attend a service to sense the throughline — more than a century and a half of neighbors deciding, over and over, to keep gathering.
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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