First Methodist Church of Oglesby
Oglesby, Coryell County, Texas
Marker Inscription
This congregation was organized in 1891 as the Methodist Episcopal Church, south, and boasted 56 members in its first year. The Rev. J. David Crockett served as its first pastor. A church structure built in 1891 was destroyed by a tornado in 1893. A second structure completed by the congregation that year was replaced by this late Victorian-Era Queen Anne style building in 1912. It features a symmetrical form with a central gable and flanking bell towers. The church has sponsored an annual harvest festival to fund missionaries throughout the world, including Japan and Africa.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
This congregation was organized in 1891 as the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and counted 56 members in its first year under its first pastor. An early building was destroyed by a tornado in 1893, and its replacement gave way in 1912 to this late Victorian Queen Anne church with a central gable and twin bell towers. For generations the congregation funded missionaries abroad through an annual harvest festival.
Why it matters
Handsome rural churches like this one were the social and spiritual centers of small Texas farm towns, binding communities together through hardship and celebration.
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Related people
- · J. David Crockett
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
First Baptist Church of Oglesby
Oglesby, TX
The First Baptist Church of Oglesby grew out of an 1893 revival and was formally organized in September 1896, calling J.M.B. Gresham as its first pastor. For its early decades the congregation gathered only once or twice a month, weathering the loss of its first building to fire in 1913 before rebuilding the following year. Missionary outreach and community involvement have long marked its life.
Station Creek Cemetery
Oglesby, TX
Established in 1856 beside a Methodist Episcopal church, Station Creek Cemetery opened with the burial of 28-year-old Robert Morris, whose mother would join him twenty years later. Most of its forty headstones predate 1890, and among the graves are numerous Confederate soldiers and two brothers, W.R. and J.M. Green, hanged by a vigilante mob as accused horse thieves. When the congregation moved to McGregor in the 1880s, the cemetery was left to the wider community.
Deyerle-Fall House
McGregor, TX
William Deyerle, a banker, rancher, and miller who came to Central Texas from Virginia, hired master stonemason Henry Wissman to build this limestone home, completed in 1892. Wissman quarried and hauled every stone himself, laying them to his own design beneath a hipped roof trimmed with arched windows and a bracketed cornice. After a family tragedy claimed Deyerle's widow and her second husband in 1926, the house passed to her sister and stayed in the Fall family until 1975.
Coryell Baptist Church
Oglesby, TX
Recognized as Coryell County's first Baptist church, this congregation was gathered by two elders in the mid-1800s, with a roster of charter families whose names still dot the county. For years the members met in homes and a schoolhouse before raising a permanent building on land donated by two of their own. When the historic church was finally dismantled in 1982, its lumber was reused to repair the local tabernacle — a fitting second life for a pioneer sanctuary.