Goodwill Missionary Baptist Church
Cooks Point, Burleson County, Texas
Marker Inscription
In 1854, numerous slaves arrived near Cooks Point, led by A.S. Broaddus on a six-month wagon ride from Virginia. In 1887, many now-emancipated African American families asked Broaddus to help establish their own church. After the purchase of land near Cedar Creek for $6 on Nov. 13, 1888, Jerry Shorter was called as the first pastor, and Bill Waller, Polk Davis, Ephran Jones and Mason Bridges were ordained deacons. A small building was erected, and regular services began joyfully. The church was rebuilt several times and became the center of a community with a school, cemetery and store. The congregation continues to offer worship, fellowship and cultural heritage to the community.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In 1854, enslaved people led by A. S. Broaddus arrived near Cooks Point after a six-month wagon journey from Virginia. In 1887 many of those now-emancipated African American families asked Broaddus to help them establish their own church, and after buying land near Cedar Creek in 1888 they called Jerry Shorter as first pastor. Rebuilt several times, Goodwill Missionary Baptist became the center of a community with its own school, store, and cemetery.
Why it matters
The church's founding by freed people just decades after their forced migration shows how emancipated African Americans built independent institutions of faith and community during Reconstruction.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
The story of Goodwill Missionary Baptist Church begins in bondage and ends in an enduring institution — an arc that runs straight through the most wrenching decades of American history. In 1854, years before the Civil War, a large group of enslaved people was brought overland from Virginia to the Cooks Point area of Central Texas, a brutal six-month wagon journey that was part of a much larger forced movement of enslaved people into the cotton frontier of the Southwest.
Burleson County lay in that fertile, slaveholding stretch of Texas where plantation agriculture was expanding right up to the war. For the people brought here, Texas was not a promised land but the end point of a forced march, far from everything and everyone they had known.
Emancipation changed the ground beneath them. In the years after the war — the Reconstruction era and the decades that followed — freed people across the South and in Texas set about building the institutions that slavery had denied them: their own land, their own schools, and above all their own churches. It is in that hopeful, hard-won season that this congregation was born.
People & events
The same man appears at both ends of the story. A. S. Broaddus led the enslaved people on that long wagon road from Virginia in 1854. More than three decades later, in 1887, many of those same people — now free — turned to him again, this time asking help to establish a church of their own. It is a complicated, very human thread binding the era of slavery to the era of freedom.
The congregation moved quickly and concretely. On a November day in 1888 they purchased land near Cedar Creek for the sum of six dollars, and they called Jerry Shorter as their first pastor. Four men — Bill Waller, Polk Davis, Ephran Jones, and Mason Bridges — were ordained as the first deacons. A small building went up, and regular services began, the marker tells us, joyfully.
From that modest start the church grew into something larger than a building. Rebuilt several times over the years, it became the anchor of a whole community, one that gathered around it a school, a cemetery, and a store — the full infrastructure of a people determined to shape their own lives.
Its place in the American story
Across the postwar South, the Black church became far more than a house of worship. It was the one institution freed people fully owned and controlled, and so it became a schoolhouse, a meeting hall, a mutual-aid society, and the beating heart of community life. Goodwill Missionary Baptist is a clear, local example of that national pattern.
What gives this church its particular power is the specificity of its origin. The same people who endured a forced journey from Virginia in bondage lived to buy their own ground and found their own congregation in freedom. That is emancipation made tangible — not an abstraction in a proclamation, but land deeded, a pastor called, deacons ordained, a school opened.
That a school, store, and cemetery grew up around the church shows how these congregations became the seedbeds of self-sufficient Black communities in an era that offered freed people little help and much hostility. To trace this church's history is to see how ordinary people built lasting institutions out of faith and sheer resolve.
If you visit
Cooks Point is a small place, and this is a working church with a living congregation — a site whose meaning is carried by the community that still worships here, not by any grandeur of scale. Approach it with that respect and it will reward you.
Read the marker slowly and let the dates line up: 1854, the forced journey; 1888, the six-dollar purchase and the first pastor. Holding those two moments together in one glance is the whole story — the distance traveled from bondage to a congregation's own ground in a single lifetime.
If you're exploring the country roads of Burleson County, this is a stop that trades spectacle for depth. Think of the school, the store, and the cemetery that once clustered here, and of the joy the marker records at those first services. You leave understanding how faith built not just a church, but a community.
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
- · A. S. Broaddus
- · Jerry Shorter
Themes & tags
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