First United Methodist Church
Tom Bean, Grayson County, Texas
Marker Inscription
This congregation was organized in the mid-1880s, growing out of brush arbor meetings at the Cedar Campground near Whitemound. The original church building at Whitemound was moved, in 1906, to Tom Bean, where it burned in 1924. Methodists worshiped in the Presbyterian church until it was destroyed by a tornado a short time later. A new edifice was built, serving both denominations until 1972. In 1974, the sanctuary was moved here, and the heritage of the old Perrin Air Force Base Chapel was preserved when it was added to the facility.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
This Methodist congregation grew out of open-air brush arbor meetings at a rural campground in the mid-1880s, then followed its people into the new railroad town of Tom Bean. Fire, a tornado, and shared quarters with the Presbyterians all shaped its story, and a later sanctuary even preserved the heritage of a chapel from the nearby Perrin Air Force Base. It is a congregation whose home moved and rebuilt again and again as the community around it changed.
Why it matters
Its wandering, much-rebuilt history captures how faith communities anchored small Texas towns through fire, storm, and the shifting fortunes of the railroad era.
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Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Site of Early Grayson County Settlement - Whitemound
Tom Bean, TX
Named for two great white outcrops of rock nearby, Whitemound was settled in 1849 when Henry Lackey brought his nine children south from Missouri. A town blossomed around A. S. Lackey's grist mill, complete with a post office, churches, doctors, and the Bosworth Academy. When the Cotton Belt Railroad bypassed the site in 1888, residents drifted away, and Whitemound faded into memory.
City of Tom Bean
Tom Bean, TX
Wealthy Bonham landowner and surveyor Thomas Bean donated fifty acres for a branch railroad from Sherman to Commerce, and the town of Tom Bean sprang up in 1887, the year he died. Nearby Whitemound, bypassed by the rails, lost its post office and its settlers to the new town. By the early 1900s Tom Bean boomed with a grain company, drugstore, newspaper, saloon, dance hall, and movie theater—until cars and the decline of cotton drew business away to Denison and Sherman.
Old Cedar Community
Sherman, TX
Settled in 1848 by Grayson County pioneers who reclaimed land from wilderness amid Indian raids and frontier hardship, Old Cedar quickly needed a cemetery—still holding some 400 graves, including one Union and eighteen Confederate veterans. As the community took root it built Cedar Academy in 1871, where students learned to make ink and split goose-quills alongside their lessons, and organized the Cedar Methodist Church the same year. Camp-ground revivals under brush arbors drew families from miles around each summer.
Kentuckytown Baptist Church
Whitewright, TX
Founded in 1853 by Kentuckians who rolled into North Texas by wagon train, this congregation is a marker of the great overland migrations that carried Upland Southern families west before the Civil War. The settlers named their new community for the home state they had left behind, and the present sanctuary went up in 1904.