Myrtle Springs Baptist Church, BMA
Quitman, Wood County, Texas
Marker Inscription
In the fall of 1861, William Setzler deeded land for church purposes, and the Myrtle Springs Missionary Baptist Church of Christ, as it was originally called, was organized and led by a Rev. Coker. Initially meeting in a nearby log schoolhouse, the congregation soon built a wooden church building. Later buildings were financed by gifts including cattle and eggs. In 1964, a baptistery was added to the 1949 sanctuary. Church members were previously baptized in ponds or in Myrtle Springs behind the church. Affiliated with the Baptist missionary Association (BMA), the church has continued to grow and add new facilities. With a focus on educational and missionary programs, it serves members from throughout Wood County. (2004)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Myrtle Springs Baptist Church began in the fall of 1861, when William Setzler deeded land and a congregation gathered under a Rev. Coker, first meeting in a log schoolhouse before building a wooden church. Early members financed later buildings with gifts of cattle and eggs, and baptized converts in nearby ponds and springs until a baptistery was added in 1964. It grew into a Baptist Missionary Association congregation serving Wood County.
Why it matters
The church's cattle-and-eggs financing and spring baptisms capture the resourceful faith of rural 19th-century Texans building lasting institutions from little.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
This congregation's story begins in the fall of 1861 — a fateful year in American history, with the Civil War freshly underway and Texas newly joined to the Confederacy. Yet out in the rural reaches of this East Texas county, life went on in the timbered, spring-fed country where farming families were carving out homesteads.
It was a world of small settlements, hard work, and thin resources. Cash was scarce; what people had was land, livestock, and the produce of their own farms. A community that wanted a church could not simply write a check for one — it had to give what it actually possessed.
Against the backdrop of a nation at war, the founding of a country church was a quiet act of faith in the future — a bet that this place would endure, that families would keep gathering here long after the war's uncertainties had passed.
People & events
The beginning came as a gift of land. In the fall of 1861, William Setzler deeded a parcel for church purposes, and a congregation organized under the leadership of a Rev. Coker, taking the name it originally carried: the Myrtle Springs Missionary Baptist Church of Christ.
Like so many frontier congregations, it started in a borrowed room — a nearby log schoolhouse — before the members built a wooden church of their own. And here the story turns memorable, because of how those later buildings were paid for. Lacking money, the congregation financed its buildings with gifts in kind: cattle and eggs, the honest currency of a farming community, offered up so that the church could grow.
Water runs through the church's history as surely as faith does. For generations, new members were baptized outdoors — in nearby ponds, or in the springs behind the church that gave the place its name. Only in 1964 was a baptistery added to the sanctuary that had been built in 1949, bringing that ancient rite indoors at last. Affiliated with the Baptist Missionary Association, the church kept growing, adding facilities and focusing on its educational and missionary work while serving members from across the county.
Its place in the American story
This is the story of how rural America built its lasting institutions out of almost nothing — how faith, in the hands of ordinary farming families, became brick and timber and enduring community. The cattle-and-eggs financing is not a quaint detail; it is the whole truth of frontier life, where wealth was measured in livestock and harvests, and generosity meant giving those away.
The outdoor baptisms speak to the same reality. Long before indoor plumbing and formal baptisteries reached the countryside, the pond and the spring served the sacred purpose — the natural landscape itself woven into the community's spiritual life. That a baptistery did not arrive until the 1960s is a reminder of how recently rural America lived close to the land in this way.
Congregations like this one, founded in the Civil War era and carried forward for generation after generation, are the connective tissue of small-town America. Their survival across more than a century of war, hardship, and change is a testament to the resourcefulness and persistence of the people who built them.
If you visit
Look first for the water. The springs that gave this place its name still speak to the congregation's earliest days, when converts waded into ponds and spring water to be baptized under the open sky. Knowing that history, the setting itself becomes part of the story.
Think, too, about what it took to build here. Every board of the early church was, in a real sense, paid for in cattle and eggs — the gifts of families who had little cash but deep commitment. That knowledge changes how a simple country church looks; it becomes a monument to collective sacrifice.
This is a rewarding stop for a traveler drawn to the quieter corners of East Texas history. It carries you back to the fall of 1861 and to a farming community that, in the middle of a national war, chose to plant something meant to last. More than a century and a half later, it still stands — proof that their bet on the future paid off.
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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Themes & tags
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