First Christian Church of Anna

🏛️The era

In the 1840s, the blackland prairies of North Texas were still frontier country. The Republic of Texas was young, and Collin County did not yet exist as a settled place. Settlers from Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri and other states were pushing into the rolling grasslands north of the Trinity River, bringing their farming habits and their churches with them.

Many of those settlers belonged to the Restoration Movement. This was a homegrown American religious movement that grew out of the early 1800s, and its followers called themselves simply Christians or Disciples of Christ. They wanted to set aside denominational creeds and return to what they saw as the plain church of the New Testament. On the frontier, where ordained clergy were scarce, its emphasis on lay leadership and congregational independence suited a scattered population. Liberty Christian Church, founded in 1846, was planted in that soil, and the marker counts it among the earliest Christian churches in Texas.

The next generation brought a different force: the railroad. After the Civil War, Texas raced to lay track, and the Houston and Texas Central pushed north toward the Red River in the early 1870s. Wherever the rails went, new towns sprang up almost overnight. Wherever they didn't, older communities often withered. The story of this congregation sits right on that fault line between the wagon-road frontier and the railroad age.

👥People & events

The story begins with two pioneer settlers, Collin McKinney and J. B. Wilmeth. McKinney is one of the best-known names in early Texas: he signed the Texas Declaration of Independence, and both Collin County and the city of McKinney are named for him. In 1846 he and Wilmeth gathered their neighbors in northern Collin County into Liberty Christian Church. A small band of frontier families thus became one of the oldest congregations of its kind in the state.

The Liberty congregation was ambitious. In 1854 its members founded a Christian seminary about two miles northwest of this spot, in the new community of Mantua. For a while Mantua looked like a place with a future, a little center of faith and learning on the prairie.

Then, in 1872, the Houston and Texas Central laid its tracks on a north-south line several miles east of Mantua. That one decision redrew the local map. The railroad towns of Van Alstyne, just over the line in Grayson County, and Anna, which grew up right here in the early 1880s, drew people and business toward the tracks, and Mantua faded. Local tradition holds that its Christian congregation divided, with some members going to each new town.

In Anna, a resident named Rebecca Sherley helped organize the First Christian Church in 1882, together with former Mantua church members. The Rev. Alf Douglas became its first pastor, and the congregation met in the Sherley home. When that house burned in 1886, the church was left without a place to gather. Around 1890 the members built their first sanctuary on the very ground where the Sherley home had stood, turning a site of loss into their permanent home. Major additions to the rear of the building followed in 1949.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

Across the United States in the late 1800s, railroads decided which towns lived and which died. Map-makers and railroad surveyors, not settlers, often chose the main streets of the West. Towns that had grown up around a mill, a crossroads or a school picked up and moved, sometimes literally hauling buildings to the new depot. Mantua's decline and Anna's rise are a textbook local example of that national pattern.

The church's history also shows how American religious movements traveled west. The Restoration Movement, which produced the Disciples of Christ, began in the early republic and spread with the frontier. Congregations like Liberty were how it put down roots: lay-led, independent, and built by the same families who were breaking the sod.

There is also a quieter story here about women in frontier church life. Official histories often remember founders and pastors, but congregations like this one survived because people like Rebecca Sherley opened their homes when there was no building. The fact that the sanctuary stands on the site of her house makes that contribution visible in a way that's rare.

🧭If you visit

Today Anna is part of the fast-growing ring of communities north of Dallas, and much of the land around it is turning from farmland into subdivisions. That makes a marker like this worth seeking out. It is a reminder that the town's center of gravity was once set by a railroad line and a congregation that followed it.

As you stand here, try to picture the scene in 1886: a family home burning, a young church losing its meeting place, and members deciding to build on that same lot a few years later. Note how the sanctuary has grown over time, with the later additions at the rear. A building that keeps getting added to is a sign of a congregation that kept going.

This stop pairs naturally with a drive through Collin County's older towns. You can head south to McKinney, the county seat named for the church's co-founder, or north toward Van Alstyne, Anna's sister railroad town and the other heir to Mantua's congregation. Following the old rail corridor between them is a good way to see how the tracks shaped this part of Texas. Please be respectful, since this is an active church and not a museum.