Hurst Ranch Cemetery

Star, TX

In the young settlement of Center City—first known as Hughes Store—a circuit-riding preacher brought Methodism to the area in the early 1870s, and charter members organized a church in 1878. The congregation first gathered in the Masonic lodge before building its own home in 1901, then a new building in 1952. Through mission work and youth ministry, it has remained a spiritual anchor of this small central Texas community.

Evant, TX

Organized in the mid-1870s in the Langford's Cove community, later renamed Evant, this Methodist congregation began with just seven charter members and, when its founding pastor returned to Mississippi, kept the faith alive through prayer meetings, brush-arbor gatherings, and camp meetings. New families arriving from as far as Rhode Island and Wales swelled its ranks, and the congregation shared a building with other denominations until it built its own in 1905. It reached its peak of 201 members in 1963 and continues today.

Goldthwaite, TX

Organized in 1899 with nineteen charter members in the tiny community of North Bennett, this Primitive Baptist congregation bought fifteen acres for a meetinghouse and cemetery and, like many rural Texas churches, doubled its building as a schoolhouse shared among denominations. The community thinned during World War II and the congregation dwindled, but its cemetery still holds early settlers and military veterans and continues to serve the surrounding countryside.

Adamsville, TX

Settlement of this Lampasas County community began just before the county organized in 1856, and it grew around Oliver Hazzard Perry Townsen's flour mill on the Lampasas River. By the 1880s the crossroads had steam mills, churches, a school, and a general store whose partners, John T. Adams and Rev. McCall Smith, gave rise to the platted town of Adamsville in 1908. Over the following century it evolved from a frontier milling settlement into a close-knit rural community of fiddling jams and community barbecues.