First United Methodist Church, Grapevine
Grapevine, Tarrant County, Texas
Marker Inscription
In 1854, Nathan Hudgins, a circuit riding lay preacher, purchased acreage located in the middle of present-day Grapevine. Reverend Nathan Hudgins (also known as El Nathan Hudgins) was born May 10, 1814, and came to Texas in 1854 from Bellefonte, Alabama. The work of circuit rider was strenuous and dangerous and Hudgins began to conduct weekly and bi-weekly services from his home. Seeking a more permanent church organization, Hudgins arranged for the establishment of the Grapevine Methodist Episcopal Church, south in 1866. Worship was held in his home until 1873. In 1872, E.N. Hudgins and Susan L. Hudgins deeded two acres of land for a place of worship for members of the Grapevine Methodist Episcopal Church. The following year, a structure was erected but damaged by a windstorm in 1887. A new structure was built in 1901 complete with a bell tower and a stained glass window in honor of Reverend Hudgins who passed away that year. As attendance increased, so did the need for larger facilities. Over the years, multiple buildings were built, removed and/or renovated to accommodate the growing congregation. In 1968, to reflect the merging of the National Methodist Church and Evangelical United Brethren Church, the name was changed to the First United Methodist Church, Grapevine. Many ongoing ministries and community outreach programs solidify the church as a faithful servant of the grapevine community, providing service and love since grapevine’s establishment.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In 1854 circuit-riding lay preacher Nathan Hudgins came from Alabama to Grapevine and began holding services in his own home, work that was both strenuous and dangerous on the Texas frontier. He helped organize the Grapevine Methodist Episcopal Church, South in 1866, and in 1872 he and his wife deeded two acres for a house of worship. A stained-glass window installed in 1901 honored Hudgins in the year of his death, and the merging denominations gave the church its present name in 1968.
Why it matters
The congregation preserves the story of the frontier circuit rider, the itinerant preacher who carried organized religion across a thinly settled Texas.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the 1850s, the stretch of North Texas prairie that would become Grapevine was thinly settled frontier — open country where families arrived faster than churches, schools, or roads could follow. This was the era of the young Texas republic giving way to statehood, and of a great westward drift of settlers from the older Southern states looking for land and a fresh start.
Organized religion reached places like this not by building steeples first, but by sending people. The circuit rider — an itinerant preacher who traveled a long loop of scattered homes and settlements, carrying the Gospel on horseback — was one of the defining figures of the American frontier. The work was strenuous and genuinely dangerous: long rides through rough country, in all weather, to congregations that might be no more than a family gathered in a front room.
Against that backdrop, the founding of a permanent church was a milestone. It meant a community had grown settled enough to stop meeting in parlors and start building for the generations to come.
People & events
The story here begins with Nathan Hudgins, sometimes called El Nathan Hudgins, born in 1814. In 1854 he came to Texas from Bellefonte, Alabama, and bought acreage in the heart of what is now Grapevine. He was a circuit-riding lay preacher, and he took up the demanding rhythm of that calling, holding weekly and bi-weekly services out of his own home.
Hudgins wanted something more permanent than a house church. In 1866 he arranged for the organization of the Grapevine Methodist Episcopal Church, South, though worship continued in his home for several more years. Then, in 1872, he and Susan L. Hudgins deeded two acres of land for a proper place of worship. A building went up the following year — only to be damaged by a windstorm in 1887, one of the ordinary calamities of prairie life.
The congregation persisted. In 1901 the members raised a new structure complete with a bell tower and a stained-glass window honoring Reverend Hudgins, who died that same year — the founder memorialized in glass in the church he had willed into being. As the congregation grew, buildings were added, removed, and remade to keep pace. In 1968 the name changed to First United Methodist Church, Grapevine, after the Methodist and Evangelical United Brethren churches merged.
Its place in the American story
This congregation preserves, in one place, the whole life cycle of frontier American religion — from a lone preacher on horseback to a settled downtown church. The circuit rider was how faith kept up with a country expanding faster than its institutions, and Nathan Hudgins is a textbook example: a man who bought land, rode a circuit, preached from his parlor, and only gradually built the permanent church his community needed.
The church's very name carries a piece of national history. The "South" in Methodist Episcopal Church, South was no accident of geography — it marked a denomination that had split in the 1840s over slavery, dividing along the same fault line that would soon divide the country. That a Texas church organized in 1866 bore that name is a quiet reminder of how deeply the era's great national rupture reached into ordinary community life. The later renaming, after decades of reconciliation and merger among Methodist bodies, closes that circle.
So the marker is more than local memory. It shows the sweep of American religious history — expansion, schism, endurance, and reunion — playing out on a single patch of North Texas ground.
If you visit
Grapevine today is a lively town near the sprawl of the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex, which makes the endurance of this congregation all the more striking. To visit is to hold two time scales at once: a modern suburb, and beneath it the memory of open prairie a circuit rider once crossed on horseback.
Let the marker slow you down. Read it and picture the sequence it describes — services in a preacher's home, two acres deeded for a church, a building lost to a windstorm and raised again, a bell tower and a memorial window for the founder who died the year it was finished. Those details reward a few quiet minutes on foot rather than a passing glance.
It fits neatly into a day of exploring Grapevine's historic character, where the old town core still anchors the community. Stand with the marker and let it remind you that behind a settled Main Street lies a frontier story of one determined preacher and the congregation he built to outlast him.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Nathan Hudgins
- · Susan L. Hudgins
Themes & tags
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