Miller Grove Methodist Church
Cumby, Hopkins County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Circuit-riding ministers held worship services for Methodists in Miller Grove one Sunday a month as early as 1860. Formally organized in 1870, the congregation met in the community schoolhouse until members constructed their own sanctuary at this site on land donated by the Corbet family. Completed in 1900, the church building was used for many years by other denominations and for various community functions. The historic congregation was renamed Miller Grove United Methodist Church in 1968.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Methodists at Miller Grove first gathered under circuit-riding preachers who reached the community once a month as early as 1860. Formally organized in 1870, the congregation worshipped in the local schoolhouse until it built its own sanctuary in 1900 on land donated by the Corbet family. The building long doubled as a home for other denominations and community gatherings before the church took the United Methodist name in 1968.
Why it matters
The traveling circuit rider and the shared frontier schoolhouse were how faith and community organized themselves across a thinly settled countryside, and this congregation embodies that pattern.
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Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Miller Grove Cemetery
Cumby, TX
This graveyard has served the Miller Grove community since before Hopkins County was even formed in 1846, beginning as a family plot said to be donated by the Pippin family and growing into a community cemetery. Its stones include the distinctive tree-stump monuments of the fraternal Woodmen of the World and the graves of veterans reaching back to the Civil War. A cemetery association founded in 1965 still tends the historic ground.
Greenview Community and Cemetery
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In 1839 the Rev. Green Weaver, a merchant, minister, and slaveholder, brought his family to this Hopkins County land and built a two-room log cabin along an old wagon trail from Shreveport. The family burial ground began in 1848 with the grave of the Weavers' infant daughter, placed close to home so her mother could walk to it, and opened to the public in 1878. A community grew up around the church and school that the Weavers' descendants helped establish, and the renamed Greenview Cemetery still holds more than 1,200 graves.
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In the late 1830s, Texas Rangers camped in a grove of blackjack oaks west of present-day Cumby, and settlers gathered nearby for protection at a place called Black Jack Grove. To the south, James M. and Mary Long settled along Turkey Creek in the 1850s, reportedly setting aside land around 1860 to bury a girl who died as her family passed through. The oldest marked grave belongs to John M. Webb (d. 1869), and among later burials rest Civil War veterans and Woodmen of the World members.
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