First Presbyterian Church of Kingsville
Kingsville, Kleberg County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Tradition holds that Presbyterians in Kingsville first held services under mesquite trees before formally organizing on January 8, 1905. That day, the Rev. A.H.P. McCurdy led several men and women in services at the Kingsville Lumber Company. Henrietta King and the Kleberg Town and Improvement Company donated land at this site to the congregation, which dedicated its first sanctuary in April 1906. The congregation built its present sanctuary in 1956. Today, the church remains a significant part of Kingsville’s religious and social community by sharing in ecumenical endeavors with other churches. (2006)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Tradition says the first Presbyterians in Kingsville worshipped in the shade of mesquite trees before formally organizing in January 1905, meeting at the Kingsville Lumber Company under the Rev. A.H.P. McCurdy. Henrietta King and the Kleberg Town and Improvement Company—the interests behind the great King Ranch town—donated the land, and the congregation dedicated its first sanctuary in 1906.
Why it matters
The church's founding traces the birth of a planned South Texas ranching town, where the King Ranch empire shaped even the spiritual life of the community it built.
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Related people
- · A.H.P. McCurdy
- · Henrietta King
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
First United Methodist Church of Kingsville
Kingsville, TX
Kingsville's first Methodist service was held on March 4, 1904, when a visiting Corpus Christi pastor preached to thirty-one worshippers seated under mesquite trees in the brand-new railroad town on the King Ranch. The congregation moved from storefronts and a borrowed Presbyterian church into its own building by 1909, and grew through a succession of sanctuaries to the one completed in 1951. Its decades of missionary and community work helped anchor the young South Texas town.
Englishmen in South Texas, 1568
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More than half a century before the Pilgrims reached Plymouth, three English sailors trekked through South Texas in 1568. They were survivors of Sir John Hawkins's ill-fated trading voyage, put ashore near Tampico after a Spanish attack and left to walk north through unknown country. Of the twenty-six who headed north, only Richard Browne, David Ingram, and Richard Twide are said to have reached Europe again—Ingram later describing to Queen Elizabeth's secretary the coastal peoples, the grasslands of the Rio Grande, and the prickly pear that kept them alive.
Chamberlain Cemetery
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At the turn of the 20th century, King Ranch owner Henrietta King and neighboring ranchers backed the St. Louis, Brownsville and Mexico Railway to move cattle to market, and the new railroad town of Kingsville rose around its headquarters. In 1908 a cemetery association bought forty acres and opened Chamberlain Cemetery the next year, naming it for Henrietta's father, pioneer minister Hiram Chamberlain. It became the resting place of Henrietta and Captain King, railroad visionary Uriah Lott, and other builders of South Texas.
Mexican Activities at Santa Gertrudis in the 1830's
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This camp on the Santa Gertrudis was a strategic waypoint during the Texas Revolution, hosting the northward march of General José Urrea's column of Santa Anna's army in early 1836. Among those who passed through were figures on both sides of the era's brutality — the merciful "Angel of Goliad" and Colonel Garay, alongside Colonel Portilla, who carried out the Palm Sunday execution of Texan prisoners at Goliad. After the Mexican defeat at San Jacinto, the same ground witnessed the ragged southward retreat of thousands of soldiers, camp followers, and captured livestock.