Founding of the First Methodist Church
San Marcos, Hays County, Texas
Marker Inscription
On this site, in the log house of John D. Pitts (1797-1861), circuit rider A. B. F. Kerr (1823-81), on Aug. 5, 1847, organized the first church in Hays County. The congregation met here two years; later built a church on west side of the same block.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In 1847, in the log home of John D. Pitts, circuit rider A. B. F. Kerr organized the first church in newly created Hays County. The small congregation worshipped in the cabin for two years before building its own house of worship nearby.
Why it matters
The gathering marks the beginning of organized religious and community life in Hays County at the dawn of Texas statehood.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
The founding this marker commemorates happened in 1847, just two years after Texas joined the United States. The Central Texas frontier was raw and lightly settled, and a family's log house was frequently the largest sheltered space for miles — which is why so many first gatherings, whether for worship, court, or community business, took place around someone's hearth.
This is the world of the earliest Anglo settlement in the region: cabins rather than towns, footpaths and river crossings rather than roads, and institutions that existed in people's homes long before they had buildings of their own. When the marker notes this was the first church organized in the county, it's marking a genuine beginning, not just for a congregation but for organized community life in the area.
It was also the golden age of the Methodist circuit rider. Across the young republic and its new western states, Methodism spread not by settled ministers in finished churches but by traveling preachers who rode enormous loops on horseback, holding services wherever people would gather. A frontier this thin was exactly the ground those riders were built to cover.
People & events
The story turns on two men and a single day. On August 5, 1847, the circuit rider A. B. F. Kerr rode to the log house of John D. Pitts and organized a congregation — the first church in the county, according to the marker that now stands on the spot.
Pitts, born in 1797, was of the generation that had come of age in the early republic before pushing west; opening his home for worship was the kind of act that quietly founded communities. Kerr, born in 1823, was a young man doing the demanding, itinerant work that defined frontier Methodism, and the specific date preserved on the marker gives the founding an unusually precise anchor.
What happened next is just as revealing as the founding itself. The congregation met in the Pitts cabin for two years before building its own house of worship on the west side of the same block. That short move — from a borrowed room to a purpose-built church only steps away — is the whole arc of frontier institution-building compressed into a couple of years and a few hundred feet.
Its place in the American story
The image at the heart of this marker — a preacher on horseback organizing a congregation in a settler's cabin — is one of the defining scenes of nineteenth-century American religious life. The circuit-rider system carried organized faith into new territory faster than almost any other institution, and it did so precisely by not waiting for towns and buildings to exist first.
That matters for how we understand westward expansion. As the United States grew, churches were often among the very first organized bodies in a new community, and they frequently outlasted everything founded around them. A gathering like this one is a small but real instance of a young nation knitting its newest region into its established patterns of community life.
The two-year path from cabin to dedicated building also captures something universal about how American communities took shape on the frontier: first the people and the shared purpose, then, once those were secure, the permanent structure. It's a sequence that played out thousands of times across the expanding country.
If you visit
This is a place that rewards imagination more than sightseeing. Stand at the marker and picture the block as it was: a log house where a congregation first gathered, and then, a short walk to the west side of the same block, the church they built once they were ready to make it permanent. The story fits within a space you can take in with a single glance.
Come with the date in mind — August 5, 1847 — and the marker stops being an abstraction. You're standing where a specific man rode in on a specific day and started something that hadn't existed in the county before.
Because this site is about beginnings rather than a grand surviving structure, it pairs naturally with the other early landmarks of the same Central Texas town. Make it one stop on a short local history walk, and let it set the scene: before the courthouses and Main Street sanctuaries, there was a cabin, a traveling preacher, and a handful of people deciding to gather.
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
- · John D. Pitts
- · A. B. F. Kerr
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
First United Methodist Church
San Marcos, TX
Hays County's first church was organized on August 5, 1847, when circuit rider A. B. F. Kerr gathered nine charter members in the home of John D. Pitts. By 1849 the growing congregation met in a log house that served at once as church, courthouse, and school, braving wild animals and the dangers of the frontier to worship. A first building rose on this site in 1855, and the present Gothic Revival sanctuary was completed in 1893.
The Courthouses of Hays County
San Marcos, TX
When Hays County was organized in 1848, justice was dispensed from a log church-schoolhouse that doubled as a courthouse. Over the following six decades the county cycled through a frame building that burned in 1868, two limestone structures undone by shifting ground and fire, and finally the eclectic 1909 courthouse designed by Austin's C. H. Page & Brother that still presides over the San Marcos square. The story tracks the rise of a frontier county into an established seat of Texas government.
William W. Moon
San Marcos, TX
William W. Moon, orphaned in infancy in Alabama, came to Texas in 1838 and rode with the Texas Rangers, first seeing the San Marcos Springs during a running Indian fight in 1843. Enchanted by the country, he brought his family to build a cabin here in 1845, making the Moons the first permanent Anglo-American settlers of what became Hays County. His cabin hosted the county's first sermon and first school, and he later served in both the Mexican War and the Civil War while running a hotel, stage stop, blacksmith shop, and freight line.
Charles Cock Home
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Charles S. Cock built this limestone house in 1867, in the years when San Marcos was still a young frontier town finding its feet after the Civil War. A farmer who later served as mayor in the early 1880s, Cock raised his home from a mix of local materials—limestone, elm, pine, and cedar—the kind of hand-gathered construction typical of the Texas Hill Country.