First Methodist Church of Lockney
Lockney, Floyd County, Texas
Marker Inscription
This church traces its history to 1890, when The Rev. R. M. Morris led about twenty-five Methodists in organizing a new congregation. The church members met for worship in the local schoolhouse and under arbors until a frame sanctuary was completed in 1908. A larger brick building replaced the first church structure in 1920. To serve the growing membership, the congregation built a new facility in the 1950s. In addition to worship and educational programs, the church has been involved in community activities and worldwide missionary endeavors. (1990)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
This Lockney congregation dates to 1890, when Rev. R.M. Morris gathered about twenty-five Methodists to organize a new church on the Texas Panhandle frontier. Members worshiped in the local schoolhouse and under brush arbors until a frame sanctuary was finished in 1908, replaced by a larger brick building in 1920. A new facility followed in the 1950s as the congregation grew and took up community and missionary work.
Why it matters
The church's arbor-and-schoolhouse beginnings capture how religious life took root among the earliest settlers of the high plains of West Texas.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · R.M. Morris
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
First Baptist Church of Lockney
Lockney, TX
In December 1890, nineteen charter members led by the Rev. I. B. Kimbrough organized what became the First Missionary Baptist Church of Floyd County, worshipping first in a settler's dugout home and a country schoolhouse on the West Texas plains. The congregation merged with a neighboring Baptist church in 1899, met in the town schoolhouse until building its own sanctuary in 1906, and took the name First Baptist Church of Lockney in 1913.
The J. A. Baker Store
Lockney, TX
When James Artemas Baker opened his store in 1894, he was helping to found the town of Lockney itself on the Texas South Plains. Serving as acting and then appointed postmaster, Baker freighted in goods and, with his wife Alice, sold hardware, dry goods, groceries, and sundries — and in the early days his store safe even doubled as the town's bank. After the original frame building burned, the present structure went up in 1914, and the business remained one of the region's oldest mercantile houses still held by its founding family.
Della Plain
Floydada, TX
Della Plain sprang up in 1887 when a Baylor County rancher, driven by drought, founded a settlement here on the South Plains and named it for a benefactor's daughter. It quickly gained a school, church, post office, stores, and even a newspaper, hoping to become the county seat—but a poor water supply and the rise of nearby Lockney and Floydada doomed it, and by 1894 only the cemetery remained.
First National Bank of Floydada
Floydada, TX
Rooted in the James B. Posey Bank of the 1890s, this institution became the Floyd County Bank in 1900 and, after winning a federal charter in 1903, the First National Bank. Its early stockholders were a roll call of Floyd County's founding businessmen, and it has stood on this site since 1912. Through boom and drought it helped finance the growth of the surrounding High Plains farm country.