First Methodist Church of Diboll
Diboll, Angelina County, Texas
Marker Inscription
This congregation was founded about 1897, soon after Diboll was established as a sawmill town. Early worship services were held in a local schoolhouse and in a two-story structure shared with the local Baptist congregation and fraternal organizations. Church leaders acquired this site by lease in 1914 and built their first sanctuary that year. The land was deeded to the congregation in 1922, and additional facilities were later built to accommodate the growing membership. The church still counts among its members descendants of some of its founding families. (1991)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Diboll sprang up in the 1890s as an East Texas sawmill town, and this Methodist congregation formed almost as soon as the mill did, around 1897. Early worshippers gathered in a schoolhouse and in a shared two-story building alongside Baptists and fraternal lodges before securing their own site and raising a sanctuary in 1914. The land was formally deeded to the church in 1922 as the congregation grew.
Why it matters
The church shows how faith communities anchored the company sawmill towns that drove the East Texas timber economy, giving transient mill families a lasting sense of place.
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Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Southern Pine Lumber Company Commissary
Diboll, TX
The Southern Pine Lumber Company opened its first sawmill at Diboll around 1894 under T. L. L. Temple, and this commissary served the company town that grew up around it. Moved into its 1923 building, the store sold everything from groceries and medicine to furniture and coffins, with purchases made in company scrip—metal or waxed-paper tokens. It anchored daily life in Diboll until it closed in 1953.
Old Diboll Library
Diboll, TX
Around 1908, lumber magnate T. L. L. Temple built this hall for the workers of his Southern Pine Lumber Company, pairing a downstairs reading room and recreation space with upstairs living quarters for family, single men, and schoolteachers. Over the decades it doubled as a Red Cross sewing room during World War I and a food distribution point for struggling families during the Depression. It is a rare survivor of the company-town institutions that once organized life in East Texas.
Emporia Cemetery
Diboll, TX
This burial ground in the Angelina County pinewoods predates the timber boomtowns that grew up around it, beginning with the 1882 grave of an infant son of W.E. and Emily Waltman. When the Emporia sawmill ran nearby from 1893 to 1906, some of its workers and their families were laid to rest here, many in unmarked graves. Cared for at times by the Anthony family, the site is notable for its folk gravemarkers of petrified wood and homemade concrete, and now sits within the city limits of Diboll.
Emporia
Diboll, TX
In 1893 the Emporia Lumber Company's owners S.F. Carter and M.T. Jones bought more than 5,000 acres in south Angelina County and built a company town around a sawmill, complete with a railroad spur, logging camps, company houses, schools, churches, stores, and a cemetery. When the mill burned in 1906 it was never rebuilt, yet residents lingered even as the company folded. In time the town was swallowed by the growing city of Diboll.