First United Methodist Church of Gilmer
Gilmer, Upshur County, Texas
Marker Inscription
First United Methodist Church of Gilmer Gilmer's early settlers came in the mid-18th century. By 1849, records indicate Baptist and Methodist congregations shared space at the county's log courthouse for their services. At that time, the Rev. J.B. Tullis, a Methodist circuit rider, was appointed to the Gilmer mission. He and J.L. Camp, Sr., organized a Sunday School for the early Methodist Episcopal Church, South, congregation, which soon received a charter and was officially founded c. 1852. In 1854, the congregation organized a men's academy; two years later, they established a women's academy. These two schools, later administered by the local Masonic lodge, continued until they closed in 1862, during the Civil War. Education remained important in the Gilmer Methodist Church, which supported reading and writing in its Sunday School programs for all ages. The congregation's first two sanctuaries were frame structures. At this site, deeded to the church in 1881, stood the second structure, a white, Gothic revival building. The congregation, with more than 450 members, built a larger brick structure here in 1911. In 1924, church members financed a parsonage, located next to the sanctuary. The church continued to grow, adding an educational building in 1948 and, in 1956, dedicating a new sanctuary. They constructed a new parsonage in 1974 but retained the original home for use by the youth director and youth group. Organizations within the church have included the youth and choir programs, as well as the Women's Home Missionary Society and the Men's Bible Class. Through its mission and outreach, and with expanded facilities, Gilmer's First United Methodist Church continues to serve its community more than 150 years after its first worship services. (2003)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Gilmer's early settlers found Baptists and Methodists sharing the county's log courthouse for services by 1849, and a Methodist circuit rider soon organized a Sunday school and congregation that was chartered around 1852. The church founded separate men's and women's academies in the mid-1850s, schools that ran until they closed in 1862 amid the Civil War. Education remained central to the congregation as it grew, building ever-larger sanctuaries into the twentieth century.
Why it matters
The church shows how frontier congregations doubled as the schoolhouses and civic anchors of young Texas towns.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Rev. J.B. Tullis
- · J.L. Camp, Sr.
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
First Baptist Church of Gilmer
Gilmer, TX
This Baptist congregation began in a log cabin in 1846, the year Texas joined the Union, as the Gilmer Missionary Baptist Church of Christ. Over the following decades it grew from a couple dozen members into hundreds, erecting successive buildings, adding a Sunday School and a Ladies Aid Society, and calling its first full-time pastor in 1904. Renamed First Baptist Church of Gilmer in 1929, it has grown alongside its Upshur County town ever since.
Ragland Clinic-Hospital
Gilmer, TX
In 1933 Dr. Thomas Scott Ragland and his physician sons opened Upshur County's first full-time hospital on Cass Street in Gilmer, serving as physicians, railroad surgeons, and civic leaders. The clinic-hospital expanded repeatedly across the following decades and, amid the nursing shortages of World War II, ran a licensed vocational nursing program to train and retain staff. Renamed as new doctors joined, it remained the county's only general medical facility until it closed in 1981.
The Looney School
Gilmer, TX
Through the turbulent Civil War decade, Morgan H. Looney ran a school in Gilmer whose reputation for rigor drew boarding students from across East Texas. With separate entrances and study halls for boys and girls and monthly socials to break the discipline, the academy became a nursery for Texas leadership. Its alumni and teachers went on to become governors, a state supreme court chief justice, and a U.S. senator.
Gilgal Baptist Church
Gilmer, TX
Founded in 1865 as the Civil War ended, this Black Baptist congregation began under a brush arbor and took the biblical name "Gilgal," the Israelites' first camp in the Promised Land — a fitting choice for a people newly freed. Over the following decades its members raised a frame church, ran a Black school on donated land, and, under Rev. W. L. Dickson, opened the Dickson Colored Orphans Home. The brick-veneered sanctuary and educational annex trace a congregation that steadily built institutions of faith, learning, and care.