First Methodist Church of Canyon
Canyon, Randall County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Earliest religious service in Canyon was in 1889. Leaders were the Rev. Jerome Harelson and Isaac Mills, of Panhandle District, Methodist Church, the Rev. B. F. Jackson organized this (city's first) church in Oct. 1889. Members: Mrs. Crain, Mrs. M. M. McGee, Mrs. A. Roper, Miss Louie Roper, Mr. and Mrs. Nix Thompson and Miss Tennie Thompson. The Rev. Mr. Jackson preached to great throngs in Palo Duro Canyon, 1890; held first local funeral and first wedding, 1891. Original church building was erected under the first regular pastor, the Rev. T. F. Robeson, 1900. (1969)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Methodist leaders held Canyon's earliest religious service in 1889, and that October the Rev. B. F. Jackson organized the city's first church with a handful of founding families. Jackson preached to large crowds in Palo Duro Canyon in 1890 and conducted the community's first funeral and first wedding the next year. The congregation raised its original building under its first regular pastor in 1900, as the Panhandle town itself was just taking hold.
Why it matters
The founding of Canyon's first church coincides almost exactly with the founding of the town, marking how organized religion arrived hand in hand with settlement on the late-nineteenth-century Texas Panhandle frontier.
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Related people
- · Rev. B. F. Jackson
- · Rev. Jerome Harelson
- · Rev. T. F. Robeson
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
First Baptist Church
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Seven charter members organized First Baptist Church in the raw Panhandle town of Canyon in December 1890, when the surrounding plains were only beginning to be settled. The congregation built Canyon's first church building in 1899 and began its present structure in 1929, finishing it despite the Great Depression. Deeply tied to West Texas State University, the church started a Latin-American mission, a campus Bible Chair, and assembly grounds on the High Plains.
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From about 1890 to 1921 this Canyon wagon yard was the working headquarters for ranchmen come to town, who slept in their bedrolls or a room above the office and cooked over a campfire in the yard. It cost a dime to stable a horse and fifty cents for a man; feed and coal were for sale, water was free, and hands were hired and horses doctored on the spot.
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Surveyed on Christmas Day 1887 by L. G. Conner and named for nearby Palo Duro Canyon, Canyon rose against the Panhandle's snow, sandstorms, and grasshopper plagues. Early settlers strung the first telephone line on barbed-wire fence posts, and the arrival of the Santa Fe Railroad in 1898 made the town a cattle-shipping powerhouse that claimed some of the largest shipments in the world. In 1910 West Texas State University opened here, and town and school have grown side by side ever since.
Randall County Courthouse
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