Mount Arie (Mount Ararat) Missionary Baptist Church
Bartlett, Williamson County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Bartlett was a small farming community in 1898. Black American laborers arrived each fall for the cotton harvest. Thomas Sanders and Nelson Secret and their families called the Reverend F. E. Garrett of Temple to help them establish Mount Arie Missionary Baptist Church in June 1898. Among the first families of the church were those of the Reverend W. M. Muckleroy, Wallace Dotray and C. A. Harris. The small congregation originally met on the Bell County side of Bartlett, but in 1910 had grown enough to prompt a move to Brook Street in Williamson County. The years 1921 and 1933 were lean ones. The church building was moved to Bowie Street in 1953 because of unstable land on its Brook Street site. The structure was modernized in the 1960s and 1970s. Membership increased dramatically, and the congregation began to integrate after 1977. The eighth decade of the church's history brought new developments. The congregation moved into a new brick facility in 1980, the same year the church name was changed to Mount Ararat Missionary Baptist Church after it was discovered that Mount Arie was an abbreviation for the name of the mountain on which Noah's Ark landed as depicted in the Old Testament. The Mount Ararat Missionary Baptist Church celebrated its centennial in June 1998. The congregation supports widespread missionary and outreach programs. The membership and its diversity continue to increase as the congregation carries on in the traditions of its founders. (1999)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In 1898 Black laborers who came to Bartlett for the cotton harvest gathered with local families to found what began as Mount Arie Missionary Baptist Church, calling in a minister from Temple to help organize it. Over the decades the congregation moved repeatedly — across a county line, then to steadier ground — weathering lean years and modernizing its building. In 1980 it took the name Mount Ararat and, having begun to integrate after 1977, carried its founders' traditions into a new brick sanctuary.
Why it matters
The church's century-long story mirrors the African American experience in rural Texas, from cotton-harvest labor and segregation to the slow integration and community outreach of the late 20th century.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In 1898, Bartlett was a small farming town in the Central Texas cotton country, straddling the line between Bell and Williamson Counties. Cotton set the rhythm of life here, and every fall the harvest drew Black American laborers to the fields — work that was grueling, seasonal, and essential to the local economy. Out of that seasonal migration, a permanent community began to take shape.
This was the era of entrenched segregation across the South and Texas. Black Texans built their own institutions because the surrounding society gave them little choice and because those institutions — above all the church — were theirs to own and lead. A congregation was far more than a place to worship; it was a school of leadership, a mutual-aid society, and the beating heart of community life.
The founding of a church by cotton laborers and local families in 1898 is a small window onto the larger world of rural Black Texas at the turn of the twentieth century: people with little money and less protection, organizing something durable enough to last a hundred years and more.
People & events
The church began with families who reached out for help. Thomas Sanders and Nelson Secret and their households called on the Reverend F. E. Garrett of Temple to help them organize Mount Arie Missionary Baptist Church in June 1898. Among the first families were those of the Reverend W. M. Muckleroy, Wallace Dotray, and C. A. Harris — the founding core of a congregation that would outlast all of them.
What followed was a century of movement and perseverance written into the very address of the church. The congregation first met on the Bell County side of Bartlett, then in 1910 had grown enough to move to Brook Street in Williamson County. The years 1921 and 1933 are remembered as lean ones — hard seasons that the congregation weathered without dissolving. In 1953, unstable ground forced another move, this time to Bowie Street, and the building was modernized through the 1960s and 1970s.
The most striking chapter came late. After 1977 the congregation began to integrate, and in 1980 it moved into a new brick facility and took a new name: Mount Ararat Missionary Baptist Church, after it was discovered that "Mount Arie" was a shortened form of the biblical mountain where Noah's Ark came to rest. By its centennial in June 1998, the church had carried its founders' work across an entire century.
Its place in the American story
The century-long life of this one congregation traces, in miniature, the whole arc of the African American experience in the rural South. It begins with cotton-harvest labor and the hard realities of segregation, moves through the lean years of the 1920s and the Great Depression, and arrives at the slow, real change of the late twentieth century — including a congregation that began to integrate in the years after the civil rights movement had reshaped the nation's laws.
The Black church stands at the center of that story everywhere in America. It was the one institution Black communities fully owned and governed, and from its pews and pulpits came the leaders, the networks, and the moral confidence that powered generations of struggle and uplift. A church that grows from a handful of laborers' families into a brick sanctuary with wide missionary and outreach programs is the American story of community-building against the odds.
The renaming is its own quiet parable. A congregation that discovers the fuller meaning of its own name — Ararat, the mountain of new beginnings after the flood — and steps into a new sanctuary at the same moment is claiming both its roots and its future in a single gesture.
If you visit
A living church is best approached with respect for the fact that it is still gathering, still worshipping, still doing the work its founders started. If you visit Bartlett, take in the marker's account of the congregation's journey and then look at the town itself with that story in mind.
The geography is part of the history here. Bartlett straddles two counties, and this congregation literally crossed that county line as it grew — from the Bell County side to Brook Street in Williamson County, and later to Bowie Street. Tracing that path through town turns an ordinary set of streets into a map of a community's endurance.
Bartlett's well-preserved early-twentieth-century downtown makes it a rewarding stop on a Central Texas drive, and this marker adds a deeper layer to it: proof that the town's history was built by many hands, including the cotton-harvest families who founded a church that is still here. If services are underway, admire from a respectful distance — the best tribute to a hundred-year-old congregation is to let it worship in peace.
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
- · Thomas Sanders
- · Nelson Secret
- · Rev. F. E. Garrett
- · Rev. W. M. Muckleroy
Themes & tags
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