Glidden Baptist Church
Glidden, Colorado County, Texas
Marker Inscription
This congregation grew out of a community church that began meeting in the railroad town of Glidden as early as 1895. In 1906 the Glidden Missionary Baptist Church in Christ was formally organized. Members of the church called their first pastor, Oscar Ferrell, the following year. During the early years, baptisms were held in the Colorado River or in the pits at the Railroad Roundhouse. The Glidden Baptist Church, as the fellowship now is known, has played an important role in the community's growth and development.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In the railroad town of Glidden, a community congregation gathering as early as 1895 was formally organized in 1906 as the Glidden Missionary Baptist Church in Christ, calling its first pastor the next year. In those early days converts were baptized in the Colorado River or in the water pits at the railroad roundhouse. The fellowship, now simply the Glidden Baptist Church, became a fixture in the town's life.
Why it matters
Small-town churches like this one anchored the social and spiritual life of the railroad settlements that spread across Texas at the turn of the twentieth century.
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Related people
- · Oscar Ferrell
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Glidden
Glidden, TX
Before the rails arrived, this stretch of Colorado County launched cattle drives north to distant markets, and early settlers ranched, contracted, and built the mercantile houses that would last a century. The railroad changed everything: in 1882 T. J. Oakes sold land to the Galveston, Harrisburg & San Antonio, which raised a depot, roundhouse, and turntable, and the townsite—named for railroad engineer F. G. Glidden—was platted in 1885. Scotch-Irish and English rail workers poured in, and Glidden grew into a busy rail center.
Exum Philip Whitfield
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Exum Philip Whitfield helped build the young town of Columbus into a commercial hub along the Colorado River, wearing the many hats common to ambitious men on the mid-19th-century Texas frontier — merchant, physician, farmer, and railroad president. His leadership of the Columbus Tap Railway from 1861 to 1866 tied a small Texas town into the region's expanding rail network, even as he twice enlisted in Confederate service during the Civil War. His long life spanned the boom decades that transformed Texas from republic to industrializing state.
Carriage Step on Prairie Street
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A carriage step is a low block of stone or concrete set at the curb so guests could step down gracefully from a carriage, and its presence signaled a prominent household. This one survives outside a Prairie Street home that railroad purchasing agent R.S. Stephens and his wife bought in 1879. It is the only known carriage step in Columbus, a small relic of the age of livery stables, hitching posts, and watering troughs.
Site of Railway Hospital
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As railroads spread across Texas in the 1870s and 1880s, the companies took on the medical care of their far-flung crews. Dr. Robert Henry Harrison, trained in Cincinnati and Alabama, settled in Columbus as the Galveston, Harrisburg & San Antonio line was building west, and served as medical director for the Southern Pacific's Atlantic Division. In 1880 he built a hospital for railway employees on this site, staffed by several physicians, until fire destroyed it around 1886 and it was never rebuilt.