Nevada Baptist Church
Nevada, Collin County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Baptist worship services were held in the Nevada area before the 1880s. In 1882, the Mt. Pleasant Baptist Church divided its membership to form a new congregation known as Pleasant Hill. In 1890, under the leadership of the Rev. M.M. Wolfe, thirty-five members of the Pleasant Hill Church organized the Nevada Baptist Church. Wolfe served as the congregation's first pastor. Membership during the church's first year totaled eighty persons. The first church building was completed in 1891 and served until a brick structure was erected in 1919-20. Although the sanctuary was damaged in Nevada's destructive 1927 tornado, it provided shelter for an emergency hospital and morgue during the crisis. Over the years, Nevada Baptist Church has played an important and vital role in this small, Southeastern Collin county town. With its emphasis on mission work and community service, the congregation has produced several missionaries from among its membership. Throughout its history, it has continued to uphold the ideals and traditions of its founders. (1985)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Baptists worshiped around Nevada before the 1880s, and in 1890 thirty-five members of the Pleasant Hill church, led by the Rev. M.M. Wolfe, organized the Nevada Baptist Church. It grew quickly, replacing its first frame building with a brick sanctuary in 1919–20. When a devastating tornado struck Nevada in 1927, that sanctuary sheltered an emergency hospital and morgue.
Why it matters
The church shows how a rural congregation served as the backbone of a small Texas town—through worship, missions, and, in disaster, as a refuge for the whole community.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · M.M. Wolfe
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Empire Masonic Lodge
Nevada, TX
The Empire community once had a school, post office, churches, stores, and a cotton gin, and in 1884 twenty-five master masons chartered a lodge there, meeting on the Saturdays before full moons. As Empire faded in the 1880s the lodge followed the people to Nevada, endured the deadly 1927 tornado that leveled its building, and rebuilt with help from fellow lodges. Long after the Empire settlement vanished, the lodge adopted its last surviving remnant, Bear Creek Cemetery, and remained the oldest institution in Nevada.
Nevada
Nevada, TX
Nevada grew from an 1830s land grant into a settlement founded by Missouri emigrant Granville Stinebaugh in 1852, incorporating in 1891 as the rich Blackland Prairie drew farmers. The arrival of the St. Louis and Southwestern (later Cotton Belt) Railroad in 1888 pulled the town toward the depot and filled its downtown with shops, hotels, and fraternal lodges. Then, before dawn on May 9, 1927, a half-mile-wide tornado tore through the west side of town, killing 27 and wounding 75, ending Nevada's rise.
Bear Creek Cemetery
Nevada, TX
In the mid-1800s, settlers built the community of Empire and organized the Bear Creek Methodist Episcopal Church, whose graveyard took its first marked burials in 1873. Interred here are a Confederate veteran, physician-minister J.L. Brockman, and community leaders, their headstones bearing Masonic and Woodmen of the World emblems. Though Empire's boarding school and church are long gone, the cemetery and the relocated Masonic lodge endure as the settlement's last reminders.
Central National Road of the Republic of Texas
Josephine, TX
In the mid-1840s the fledgling Republic of Texas, hungry to draw settlers into its northeastern reaches, chartered the Central National Road to link the Red River with the military roads along the Trinity. A five-man commission set the project in motion in 1844, and surveyor George Stell laid out a route from present-day Dallas northeast through seven counties, hugging open prairie and natural stream crossings. Though the road may never have been fully built and was soon eclipsed by the Preston Road and the railroads, it helped pry open a swath of frontier Texas to farms and towns.