Merriman Baptist Church
Ranger vicinity, Eastland County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Local Baptists met in private homes for many years between the nomination of Merriman as the county seat in 1874 and the organization of the Merriman Baptist Church in 1892. The charter members were Edmond Duncan, Fannie Duncan, Josie Duncan, Ozella Duncan, T. W. Duncan, Cles Hollaway, H. A. Inman, George Moss, C. J. Pugh, B. R. Williams, I. B. Williams, Virginia Williams and S. Williams. They called J. L Mays as their first pastor. The congregation erected a small church house in 1893 and a wood frame meeting house in 1903. An oil boom hit the area in 1917. Trustees of the 29-member Merriman Baptist Church leased drilling rights on the property. When the derrick struck oil, the well began to earn $300 to $400 per day. The congregation kept a small amount for operating expenses and gave the rest to various Baptist organizations and charities. For some time, the church was able to give about $100,000 a year to domestic and foreign missions, the Buckner Orphans Home, Dallas and Houston sanitariums, Simmons College, Old Ministers Relief, Baptist Standard Publishing Company, Southwest Baptist Theological Seminary, Christian education and other causes. The noise of oil drilling operations in the area became disruptive to church services in 1918. The congregation built a tabernacle in the area in which services were held until 1922 when they erected a new brick edifice. The Merriman Baptist Church boasted two hundred and twenty-five members in 1999, seven of whom were descended from the 1918 membership, and continued to meet in the structure erected 75 years before. The church continues to serve the area. (1999)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Local Baptists met in private homes for years before organizing the Merriman Baptist Church in 1892 and raising a small frame meeting house. When an oil boom struck in 1917, the congregation leased its drilling rights, and a gusher soon earned the church hundreds of dollars a day. Keeping only what it needed to operate, the small congregation gave roughly $100,000 a year to missions, orphanages, seminaries, and charities. Drilling noise eventually drove services to a tabernacle, and in 1922 the members built a brick sanctuary they still used generations later.
Why it matters
Merriman is a remarkable episode of the Texas oil boom, when a tiny country congregation turned an underground fortune into one of the era's most generous charitable engines.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the years after the Civil War, the rolling country of Eastland County, Texas, filled with farming families looking for a fresh start. Cotton, corn, and cattle set the rhythm of life, and the nearest neighbor might be a long ride across open range. Faith traveled with these settlers, but churches did not spring up overnight. A congregation often began as a handful of families gathering in one another's parlors, taking turns hosting worship until they could afford a building of their own.
That is exactly the story here. For years before the Merriman Baptist Church was formally organized in 1892, local Baptists met in private homes. The little community had been in the running to become the county seat back in 1874, a reminder that in frontier Texas, ambitions often outran what a place would ultimately become.
The late nineteenth century was an era of church-building and reform-minded generosity across the South and Midwest. Baptists in particular built networks of missions, orphanages, schools, and seminaries, all supported by the offerings of ordinary rural congregations. A church like Merriman's, small and hard-working, was a single thread in that much larger fabric of denominational life.
People & events
The founding families gave the church its backbone. Names like Duncan, Williams, Hollaway, Inman, Moss, and Pugh appear among the charter members, and they called J. L. Mays as their first pastor. In 1893 they put up a small church house, and a decade later, in 1903, replaced it with a wood-frame meeting house — steady, unremarkable progress for a country congregation.
Then came the oil. When a boom struck the area in 1917, the church's trustees leased the drilling rights on their property. The derrick struck oil, and suddenly a congregation of just twenty-nine members found itself sitting atop a well earning hundreds of dollars a day.
What they did with that money is the heart of the story. Rather than enrich themselves, the members kept only what they needed to keep the lights on and gave the rest away — for a time, on the order of a hundred thousand dollars a year to missions, orphanages, seminaries, publishing houses, and relief funds. The irony was that the very success beneath their feet grew loud: by 1918 the noise of drilling made worship difficult, so they built a tabernacle to meet in, and in 1922 raised a new brick sanctuary. Decades later the congregation still gathered in that building, a few of its members descended from those who had lived through the boom years.
Its place in the American story
The Texas oil boom is usually remembered for the fortunes it made and the wild boomtowns it threw up almost overnight. Land that had grown cotton one year became a forest of derricks the next, and lucky landowners were transformed into overnight magnates. It is a defining chapter in the American story of sudden, extractive wealth.
What makes Merriman worth remembering is that it turns that familiar story on its head. Here the windfall did not go to a single family or a distant corporation; it went to a tiny congregation that treated it as a trust rather than a prize. The decision to live simply and give lavishly is a rare and striking counterpoint to the more common tale of oil-boom excess.
In that sense the church connects two great threads of American life — the boom-and-bust drama of natural-resource wealth, and the deep tradition of religious philanthropy that built so many of the nation's schools, hospitals, and charities. A well that might have made a few people rich instead helped fund institutions across the country and beyond.
If you visit
You are in the open ranch and oil country west of the center of Eastland County, where the horizon runs long and the sky does most of the talking. Coming here means slowing down and letting the quiet settle in — this is a landscape of back roads and small communities rather than crowds.
Stand near the church and try to imagine the scene a century ago: a modest congregation, and somewhere close by a derrick pounding away loudly enough to interrupt the sermon. The contrast between the plain devotion of the place and the roar of the wealth beneath it is the thing to hold in your mind as you look around.
If you are stitching together a road trip through this part of Texas, Merriman pairs naturally with the region's broader oil-boom history. Come read the marker, take in the surroundings, and carry away the improbable image of a country church that struck it rich and chose to give nearly all of it away.
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
- · J. L. Mays
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Merriman Cemetery
Ranger, TX
Begun around 1873 as a community graveyard just as Eastland County was organized, this cemetery holds early settlers, flu victims from the 1916–17 epidemic, and veterans of conflicts from the Civil War to Korea. The 1917 oil strike on nearby land triggered a boom, and speculators reportedly offered a large sum to lease the burial ground for drilling—an offer the local congregation refused, preserving the site's sanctity.
Site of J.H. McCleskey No. 1, Discovery Well of the Ranger Oil Boom
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By 1917 area farmers and ranchers were reeling from drought and boll weevils when Texas and Pacific Coal Company manager William Knox Gordon bet that oil lay far deeper than earlier dry holes had reached. Contractor Warren Wagner drilled here on J. H. McCleskey's farm, and on October 17, 1917, at 3,432 feet the well roared in at an estimated 1,600 barrels a day. It ignited the wild, prolific Ranger boom, whose oil helped relieve wartime shortages and let the Allies, as the saying went, 'float to victory on a wave of oil.'
First Oil Well Drilled in Eastland County
Ranger, TX
On a Texas afternoon in the fall of 1917, the McCleskey No. 1 came in gushing, and the sleepy town of Ranger was never the same. Drilled through that summer and autumn under the eye of W.K. Gordon of the Texas Pacific Coal and Oil Company, the well opened the Ranger Pool and touched off one of the great oil booms of the World War I era. It flowed for thirteen years before being capped, having produced hundreds of thousands of barrels.
Roaring Ranger
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When World War I drove oil demand sky-high, Texas Pacific Coal Company manager W.K. Gordon gambled on deep drilling, and in October 1917 the McClesky No. 1 blew in as a 1,700-barrel-a-day gusher a mile south of here. Later wells yielded many thousands of barrels daily, and a village of a dozen houses exploded into a boomtown so crowded that beds were shared in shifts and stuffed chairs were rented for sleeping. Amid a two-year sea of mud, easy money drew both fortune-seekers and vice, until lawmen cracked down after five murders in a single day.