Mount Pisgah Missionary Baptist Church
Dallas, Dallas County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Mount Pisgah Missionary Baptist Church, affectionately known as “The Rock,” and established in 1864, is the oldest African American church in Dallas County. The church was named for the mountain peak from which Moses viewed the promised land. Reverend Robert F. Butler, a White circuit preacher, and a few enslaved people gathered in June 1864 under an elm tree in the White Rock Settlement on Billie Wilburn’s Farm. The founders held church services despite their enslavement, including John Huffman, Dan Howard, Sam Fowler, William Phifer, Tobe Howard and Jack Saunders. After slavery was abolished, freedmen bought land, built homes and established churches and schools. Mount Pisgah’s membership grew and congregants traveled up to five miles to attend services. The congregation met under a brush arbor and by June 1888 voted to purchase land along the waters of White Rock Creek. The first building was a long, narrow frame structure. Picnics were held on the grounds and baptisms took place in various ponds, located near White Rock Union Graveyard, at present-day Coit at North Central Expressway, and at Sowell’s Farm at present-day Spring Valley at Montfort. As membership continued to grow, the church built a new structure on this site, which was completed in 1945 and constructed of rocks hauled by church members from Jacksboro. By the early 1980s, the congregation outgrew their location and purchased a church complex on Webb Chapel Road. Through partnerships with community and worldwide groups, Mount Pisgah has helped others by providing scholarships, services to homeless populations, school supplies, assistance to food banks and funding for a water well in Ghana. Located on South Sherman Street in Richardson, Mount Pisgah continues to grow while it supports and influences its community and lands abroad through its faith. (2019)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Known as "The Rock," Mount Pisgah Missionary Baptist Church traces its founding to June 1864, when a white circuit preacher and a group of enslaved people gathered under an elm tree on a Dallas County farm—making it the oldest African American church in the county. After emancipation, freedmen bought land, built homes, and grew the congregation, purchasing property along White Rock Creek by 1888 and later raising a rock building hauled by hand from Jacksboro. Now in Richardson, the church continues its outreach from scholarships to a water well in Ghana.
Why it matters
Born under slavery and sustained through freedom, Mount Pisgah embodies how the Black church became the foundational institution of African American community life in Texas and across the South.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
Mount Pisgah Missionary Baptist Church was born in June 1864, in the final, agonizing year of the Civil War and while slavery still held its grip on Texas. That date matters enormously. The church was founded by enslaved people worshiping before their own freedom had come—an act of faith undertaken in bondage, not after deliverance from it.
Texas was, in a sense, the last frontier of American slavery. Word of emancipation famously did not reach the enslaved people of Texas until June of 1865, more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation. So this congregation's founders gathered in 1864 as people whom the law still counted as property, claiming a spiritual freedom the world had not yet granted them.
What followed—the Reconstruction and Gilded Age decades—transformed everything for such communities. Freedom brought the chance to own land, build homes, and establish churches and schools of their own. Mount Pisgah's long journey from an elm tree to a frame building to a rock church traces that very arc, from the plantation era into the hard-won institution-building of free Black Texans.
People & events
It began under a tree. In June 1864, a white circuit preacher named Reverend Robert F. Butler and a small group of enslaved people gathered beneath an elm in the White Rock Settlement on Billie Wilburn's farm. They held services despite their enslavement—and the marker preserves the founders' names: John Huffman, Dan Howard, Sam Fowler, William Phifer, Tobe Howard, and Jack Saunders. To speak those names is to honor people who insisted on worship when they were denied nearly everything else.
After slavery ended, the congregation did what freedpeople across the South did: it built. Members bought land, raised homes, and grew a church, with some traveling up to five miles to attend. They worshiped under a brush arbor until, in June 1888, they voted to purchase land along White Rock Creek and put up a long, narrow frame building. There were picnics on the grounds and baptisms in nearby ponds—the joyful, communal life of a church coming into its own.
The congregation kept rising, quite literally. In 1945 they completed a new church built of rocks that members themselves hauled from Jacksboro—an image of a whole community carrying its own sanctuary into being, stone by stone. By the early 1980s they had outgrown even that and moved to a larger complex, and the church has since reached outward with scholarships, aid to homeless and hungry neighbors, school supplies, and funding for a water well in Ghana.
Its place in the American story
To understand African American history in this country, you have to understand the Black church—and Mount Pisgah is a near-perfect illustration of why. As the oldest African American church in Dallas County, founded in 1864, it stands at the very origin point of free Black institutional life in its region.
After emancipation, the church became the one institution Black Americans truly owned and governed. It was sanctuary, school, meeting hall, mutual-aid society, and the seedbed of leadership all at once. Mount Pisgah's own history—freedmen buying land, building homes, and founding churches and schools together—is the story of an entire people constructing community from the ground up, repeated across the South.
Even its name reaches for that larger meaning. It was named for the peak from which Moses viewed the promised land, a scripture that generations of African Americans read as their own—the long journey toward a freedom seen from afar and pursued across hard ground. That the congregation now supports causes as far away as a well in Ghana shows the same impulse, grown outward: a church that began under a tree in bondage now reaching across the world.
If you visit
This is a living congregation, not a relic, so the first thing to carry with you is respect for a community whose worship has continued unbroken for over 160 years. Its nickname, "The Rock," is worth holding in mind—both for the faith it signals and for the actual stones that members once hauled from Jacksboro to raise their 1945 sanctuary.
Let the history give you a sense of place even as the church itself has moved over the generations—from an elm tree in the old White Rock Settlement, to a brush arbor, to land along White Rock Creek, and onward. Knowing that journey turns an ordinary drive through the area into a walk along a path a whole community traveled toward freedom and permanence.
Most of all, let the founding date change how you see it. Picture 1864: people still enslaved, gathered under a tree, choosing to worship anyway. Whatever else you take from this marker, take that image—the faith that came before the freedom—and let it stay with you down the road.
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
- · Robert F. Butler
Themes & tags
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