Highland Oaks Church of Christ

🏛️The era

In 1855 Dallas was barely a town at all. It had grown from a trading post and settlement started in the early 1840s on the Trinity River, and it was still a small frontier community of log and frame buildings. There were no railroads yet, and the city it would become was decades away.

On the American frontier, religion often went where settlers went before any church buildings existed. Congregations formed in homes, met in courthouses and shared whatever space they could find. A church gave newcomers community, structure and a sense of permanence in a raw new place.

The congregation founded here belonged to the Restoration Movement, an American religious movement from the early 1800s. Its leaders, including Barton W. Stone and Alexander Campbell, wanted to put aside denominational divisions and return to what they saw as the simple pattern of the New Testament church. The movement spread rapidly on the frontier, including Texas.

The decades that followed were turbulent. The Civil War divided the country, and Reconstruction brought upheaval to Texas. The arrival of the railroads in the early 1870s began turning Dallas into a real city, and this congregation grew along with it.

👥People & events

On August 6, 1855, a small group of families came together in Dallas to form a Christian Church congregation: the Coles, Halls, Hords, Millers, Peaks and Shepherds, headed by John Higgs Cole, Benjamin Franklin Hall, William Henry Hord, William Brown Miller, Jefferson Peak and Harvey Shepherd. For years they had no building. They met in private homes, the county courthouse and other places, and other families soon joined them.

In 1867 they built their first church, near what is now the intersection of Ross and Market streets. At about the same time, Gen. Richard M. Gano, a Civil War veteran, returned to Dallas. Gano served the congregation as minister and elder for many years and became one of its best-known leaders.

Then came a painful break. In 1877 the congregation split over whether musical instruments should be used in worship. To some members, the New Testament's silence on instruments meant they should not be used; others saw no such restriction. The members who wanted instruments left and later formed Commerce Street Christian Church. The rest became known as First Christian Church.

That group moved in 1881 to a new building at Pearl and Bryan streets and became the Pearl and Bryan Church of Christ. In the mid-1950s it moved to Garland Road and took the name Garland Road Church of Christ, and in 1983 it moved to Kingsley Road at Walnut Hill and became Highland Oaks Church of Christ. Through every move, the congregation kept its ties to its founders, helped start other congregations and kept serving others, with work like a food pantry and support for missionaries.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

This congregation's 1877 split is a local chapter of one of the most important divisions in American religious history. The question of instrumental music, along with disagreements over missionary societies and how churches should cooperate, gradually divided the Restoration Movement. By the early twentieth century the Churches of Christ were generally recognized as a separate body from the Disciples of Christ, the Christian Church.

That national division played out the same way in many towns: one congregation, a hard argument over worship, and two churches where there had been one. Dallas's story is especially clear because both sides of the split can be traced forward. One became a Christian Church and the other a Church of Christ.

The congregation also reflects the history of Dallas. Its addresses follow the growth of the city. It began in a frontier village, moved from building to building in the downtown core, and then followed the postwar push out to the suburbs. Few institutions in Dallas can trace their roots back to 1855.

It is also a story about how American churches deal with disagreement. Congregations that split still often keep going for generations, holding on to a sense of their founders while rebuilding their identity in new places.

🧭If you visit

The marker stands at the congregation's current home on Kingsley Road near Walnut Hill in north Dallas, a modern neighborhood that would have been open prairie when the church was founded. Standing here, you can measure how far the church has traveled, both on the map and through time.

To follow the story further, think about the older addresses named on the marker. Ross and Market streets and Pearl and Bryan streets are in and near downtown Dallas, where the congregation spent its first century. Those downtown streets, now lined with towers, were the heart of a much smaller city when the church first built there.

This is an active church, so please be considerate of services and other activities. A visit pairs well with time in downtown Dallas, where you can see the area where John Neely Bryan settled and imagine the small frontier town where six families first gathered in 1855.