First Methodist Church of Dayton
Dayton, Liberty County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Methodist worship services were conducted in West Liberty, later known as Dayton, as early as 1855. By 1900 the First Methodist Church had a full-time pastor, the Rev. G. T. Newberry, who conducted services in the Dayton schoolhouse on North Main Street. In 1906 the congregation built its first sanctuary. A one-story wooden structure with a bell tower, which continued to serve the members until 1928. A church school also was organized in 1906, and Charles Wilson was elected to serve as the first superintendent. A series of worship and education facilities were constructed to accommodate the growing congregation through the years, including a large two-story brick building with a basement on the northwest corner of Houston Avenue and Cleveland Street in 1928. Due to continued growth, the 1928 structure was razed in 1980, and the congregation built a new sanctuary in 1981. After a denominational merger in 1968, the church's name was changed to first United Methodist Church. throughout the years the congregation has served the community with a variety of worship, educational, social, and missionary programs.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Methodist worship reached the settlement of West Liberty—later Dayton—as early as 1855, decades before the congregation gained a full-time pastor and its first sanctuary in 1906. Early services met in a schoolhouse, and over the following century the church raised a succession of ever-larger buildings to keep pace with a growing membership, adopting the United Methodist name after the denomination's 1968 merger. Its long arc of construction and community programs mirrors the town's own growth.
Why it matters
The congregation's century-and-a-half of continuity shows how frontier churches anchored small Texas towns, evolving alongside the communities they served.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · G. T. Newberry
- · Charles Wilson
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Dayton's Old School
Dayton, TX
When Dayton was still part of Liberty, its children had few options for schooling until trustees established a school in 1849. This two-room Prairie-style building, built of cypress and topped with a cupola, served students from 1900 to 1910 before being moved and later converted to a residence. Saved from condemnation by the Dayton Historical Society in 2001 and restored, it reopened in 2007 as the Dayton Old School Museum, having survived a century of tornadoes and hurricanes.
Annie Colbert - Rosenwald School
Dayton, TX
By 1883 Liberty County ran 53 schools, 19 of them for African American children, though the school year was often just three months long. In the late 1890s the district hired its first Black teacher, Annie Fairchild Colbert, a Tillotson Institute graduate who — barred from teaching in Houston as a married woman — came to Dayton and, with her students, built an improved one-room schoolhouse by hand. She taught the community's children until 1918, and in 1934 a new four-room Rosenwald School was dedicated in her honor.
Site of Liberty's Ursuline Convent
Liberty, TX
In 1859 Bishop John Mary Odin sent Ursuline sisters from Galveston to Liberty, where the energetic French nun Mother Ambroise led the purchase of this site and the building of a convent and girls' school. Prominent local families enrolled their daughters as boarders and day students. The upheaval of the Civil War thinned attendance, and the school closed in 1866; the buildings were dismantled two decades later.
St. Emily Methodist Church
Baytown, TX
Emily Brown, a midwife born into slavery in 1845, inherited this land from her employer and in 1881 deeded an acre to the trustees of the local Methodist Episcopal church—among them her husband, Thompson Brown. The congregation renamed the church St. Emily in honor of her service to both Black and white communities of West Chambers County. For decades it stood as the only African American church in the Old River community, serving as both house of worship and schoolhouse.