First United Methodist Church of Midlothian
Midlothian, Ellis County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Methodist worship services in this area date to the late 1840s, meeting in homes, the people were served by circuit riding ministers from Waxahachie. A schoolhouse built for the pioneer community of Hawkins was also used as a church. Beginning in 1861 a church built in Lebanon, another pioneer settlement, served the Methodists of the area. The congregation moved to Midlothian in 1883, and a church building was completed in 1902. A new house of worship was erected in 1966. Members of the church include many descendants of its pioneer founders.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Methodist worship reached this stretch of Ellis County in the late 1840s, when settlers met in homes and were served by circuit-riding preachers who rode out from Waxahachie. Congregations gathered in pioneer schoolhouses and in early settlements like Hawkins and Lebanon before the flock consolidated in the growing railroad town of Midlothian in 1883. A permanent sanctuary rose in 1902, replaced by a new house of worship in 1966, and many members still descend from those first pioneer families.
Why it matters
The circuit rider and the frontier schoolhouse-church were how faith and community organized themselves across a still-raw Texas landscape, seeding towns that outlasted their founders.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Midlothian Cemetery
Midlothian, TX
Midlothian grew out of the Peters Colony, an ambitious 1840s effort to draw settlers onto the north-central Texas prairie. The Hawkins family arrived in 1848 and set aside land for a church and, beside it, a cemetery whose earliest marked grave belongs to Mary Elizabeth Hawkins in 1873. As the town incorporated in 1888 and prospered, the burial ground grew alongside it, gathering mayors, pioneers, ranchers, farmers, and the anonymous poor into one shared record of the community's life.
Midlothian Presbyterian Church
Midlothian, TX
In the decades after the Civil War, American Presbyterianism was split between a northern branch (PCUSA) and a southern one (PCUS), and small Texas towns often supported a congregation of each. Midlothian brought its two together in 1911, and the united congregation raised a sanctuary just before the First World War. Generations of members have anchored the town through cooperative charities like Manna House and through national and global mission work.
Site of Old Hawkins Springs
Midlothian, TX
In May 1848 William Alden Hawkins and his large family arrived here from Indiana as the first settlers in what became Ellis County, part of the Peters Colony land-grant scheme. In a frantic 28 days they cut and hauled cedar logs to raise five houses and secure claims to some 2,500 acres, drawing water from the spring beside the family home. When the county organized in 1850, Hawkins was appointed its first chief justice, and much of Midlothian later grew up on the family's surveys.
Newton Cemetery
Midlothian, TX
This family plot holds the Newtons, Peters Colony pioneers who reached the Ovilla area in the 1840s. Patriarch Larkin Newton, born in South Carolina in 1794, was a War of 1812 veteran who fought at the Battle of New Orleans and served as a county commissioner in three states before settling in Ellis County, where he built a schoolhouse for his family. The oldest grave is his own, from 1858, joined over time by his wife, children, and grandchildren.