First Presbyterian Church of Clarksville
Clarksville, Red River County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Organized at Old Shiloh, 1833; moved here 1858. This church built 1905. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1966
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
This Presbyterian congregation traces its roots to Old Shiloh in 1833, when Anglo settlers were streaming into what was then Mexican Texas, and relocated to Clarksville in 1858. The present church building went up in 1905. It stands among the oldest congregations in Red River County, a corner of Texas settled early via the routes down from the north and east.
Why it matters
Frontier churches like this anchored the first Anglo communities in northeast Texas, marking the westward spread of American settlement before the Republic even existed.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
James Clark
Clarksville, TX
Born in Tennessee in 1789, James Clark settled in Northeast Texas and founded the town of Clarksville, which bears his name. He died there in 1838, in the early years of the Republic of Texas.
The Rev. William Stevenson
Clarksville, TX
A Methodist circuit rider in the Missouri Conference, William Stevenson crossed into the Red River country in 1815 and preached to the Claiborne Wright family and their neighbors — sermons remembered as the first Protestant worship ever held in Texas, then part of Catholic New Spain. A friend of empresario Stephen F. Austin, Stevenson helped plant the seed of religious pluralism on the frontier decades before Texas independence.
Five Signers of the Texas Declaration of Independence from Red River County
Clarksville, TX
On March 2, 1836, delegates at Washington-on-the-Brazos signed the Texas Declaration of Independence, breaking from Mexico. Of the fifty-nine signers, five came from Red River County — Richard Ellis, who presided over the convention, Robert Hamilton, Albert Hamilton Latimer, Samuel Price Carson, and Collin McKinney — more than from any other old district. These men went on to shape the government of the young Republic, and one, McKinney, lent his name to both a county and a city.
Clarksville Cemetery
Clarksville, TX
James Clark, founder of Clarksville, began this burial ground in the 1830s, and it holds his father Benjamin, a Revolutionary War veteran whose grave is the earliest here. Among the others laid to rest are Albert Hamilton Latimer, a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence, the pioneering newspaperman Col. Charles DeMorse, and the early preacher-educator Rev. John Anderson. Long known as the Baptist Cemetery, it gathers the founding generation of one of northeast Texas's oldest towns.