First Presbyterian Church of McKinney

🏛️The era

In the 1870s, McKinney was a county seat finding its footing. Collin County was settled in the 1840s, and both the county and its seat were named for Collin McKinney, an early settler and a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence. The Civil War and Reconstruction years had been hard. But the early 1870s brought the railroad to the area, and with it new settlers, new trade and new institutions.

Churches were among the first institutions a growing Texas town built. Often they were the first. They were places of worship, but also places to meet, to educate children and to give a scattered farming community a sense of itself.

The denomination matters here too. The Civil War split several major American Protestant churches along sectional lines. Presbyterians in the seceding states formed their own church in 1861, and after the war it continued as the Presbyterian Church in the United States, widely known as the "Southern Presbyterian" church. Organizing a congregation in that body in 1874 placed McKinney's new church within a regional religious identity shaped by the war.

👥People & events

The congregation began on September 27, 1874, in a private home. The Rev. W.K. Marshall gathered eighteen charter members at the house of Dr. E.N. McAuley, one of McKinney's prominent physicians, and formally organized the church. James P. Nenney and W.A. Gossett became its first deacons, the members responsible for the church's practical care.

Within about two years the members had their own building, at the corner of Tennessee and Hunt Streets. It was a small frame church with a steep roof and tall, narrow windows. Its most striking feature was an ornate tower holding a bell cast especially for the fellowship and donated by Z.P. Ranney. That same bell is still in use, a sound that has linked one generation of worshippers to the next for well over a century.

The congregation grew until the little frame church couldn't hold it. For a time, services moved into the Collin County courthouse while members raised a larger church. In 1899 they finished a brick sanctuary on North Kentucky Street, and it served for more than sixty years.

In 1966, under the Rev. Sam P. Riccobene, the congregation completed a new building at this location. The members didn't leave their past behind: the chapel kept stained glass windows and furnishings from the 1899 sanctuary. So under one roof, the church holds pieces of all three of its homes.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

This church's story is a small window on one of the deepest consequences of the Civil War: the division of American churches. Methodists, Baptists and Presbyterians all split along North-South lines in the mid-nineteenth century, partly over slavery. The Southern Presbyterian body this congregation joined lasted as a separate denomination for more than a century. It didn't reunite with its northern counterpart until 1983. That long separation shows how lasting the war's divisions were, even in matters of faith.

The church's movement from home to frame chapel to courthouse to brick sanctuary to modern building also follows a pattern seen all over America. Congregations often began in parlors and grew alongside their towns, and their buildings record a community's growing wealth and size.

And the bell is a reminder of what church bells once meant in American towns. Before clocks and phones were everywhere, a bell marked worship, celebrations and emergencies. One that has rung for the same congregation since the 1870s is a rare survival.

🧭If you visit

If you are there when the bell rings, you are hearing a sound the congregation's founders knew. It is the same bell from the 1870s tower. If the chapel is open, look for the stained glass and furnishings carried over from the 1899 sanctuary. Remember that this is an active church, and be respectful of services and private gatherings.

McKinney's historic downtown, built around its courthouse square, is a pleasant place to walk, and it gives you a feel for the town these early congregations grew up in. The marker mentions Tennessee, Hunt and North Kentucky Streets, so you can trace in your head where the earlier church buildings stood.

McKinney is an easy trip from the Dallas area and works well as a half-day stop. Pair this marker with other church and courthouse-area markers nearby to see how faith, government and commerce shaped a nineteenth-century Texas county seat.