First Baptist Church
Greenville, Hunt County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Organized Sept. 1858 in local Masonic Hall by Baptist missionary John R. Briscoe and Elder W. M. Pickett with 19 charter members: Lewis W., Rebecca, Susan C., and Martha Matilda (Tillie) Moore; Nancy Moore Hines; Andrew and Mary McDonald; Ellen D. Langford; Mary Reneau; Margaret Moody; Julia Cole; John, D. H., Margaret, and Sarah Miller; Louise and J. C. Moses; Wiley A. and Sarah Mattox. Briscoe served temporarily as pastor. The first convert was Eliza Stevens, a slave. During the Civil War the congregation moved to Center Point (3 miles SE), and later returned to Greenville, meeting in the courthouse, shared by all faiths. First church building was a small frame house on a lot(1 block SE) donated by A. D. Robey and W. M. Arnold in 1873. The house burned in 1886, and a large frame structure was erected in 1887 on this block. In 1895, the church sponsored the establishment of Burleson College, a local private school, which was transferred to the State Baptist Convention in 1899. The cornerstone of a brick edifice, constructed on this site in 1905, is displayed here. Eight other local Baptist churches have spawned from this congregation. The present sanctuary was dedicated Dec. 10, 1967, and serves over 2,000 members.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Organized in a Masonic hall in 1858 with nineteen charter members, Greenville's First Baptist Church took root just before the Civil War, during which the congregation withdrew to nearby Center Point before returning to town. Its records note that its first convert was Eliza Stevens, an enslaved woman. The church raised its first building in 1873, helped found Burleson College in 1895, and gave rise to eight other Baptist congregations over the decades.
Why it matters
A frontier congregation's story — its wartime displacement, its enslaved and free members, and its founding of a college — shows how churches served as the organizing institutions of new Texas communities.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · John R. Briscoe
- · W. M. Pickett
- · Eliza Stevens
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Mary Jim Morris
Greenville, TX
Born in Georgia in 1876 and settled in Greenville by 1899, Mary Jim Morris earned her teaching certificate at a county institute for Black teachers just as African American children were first gaining access to schools in Hunt County. She taught for 45 years at Greenville's segregated schools, earned her college degree from Prairie View A&M in 1934, and in 1930 became principal of Fred Douglass Elementary. A devoted missionary at New Hope Baptist Church, she pushed her students to outdo every other school in Texas.
Douglass School
Greenville, TX
Established in Greenville's historic East Hill Community in the early 1900s, this was one of three schools for Black children during segregation, first known as the East Colored School. It was renamed for Frederick Douglass in 1928 when a new brick building rose, and it taught grades one through eight for the African American community. In 1930 Mary J. Morris became principal here—the first African American woman to hold that role in Greenville.
Center Point Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)
Greenville, TX
Born amid the violence and upheaval of Reconstruction, Center Point Christian Church grew from the survival of formerly enslaved families who gathered in the thickets of Hunt County on land no one else wanted. Charlie Haley led early religious meetings until, in 1879, he and the ordained elder Andrew Jackson Hurdle organized a congregation in the middle of those thickets, with Hurdle as its first minister. The church became a pillar of its freedom colony — championing education, jobs, and homes, and even helping staff a Black theological and industrial college — and made a point of building its meeting houses debt-free.
St. Paul School
Neylandville, TX
Neylandville grew from the land bought by James Brigham, a formerly enslaved man who purchased his family's freedom and then farmland here in the 1850s; after emancipation, other Black families settled around him, naming the community for Robert Neyland, from whom Brigham had bought his freedom. A school that began at St. Paul Baptist Church became the leading educational center for Black children in the surrounding area, formalized as the St. Paul Common School District by 1885. A new building rose here in 1918, and the school served until it joined the Commerce district in 1965.