Pilot Point Church of Christ
Pilot Point, Denton County, Texas
Marker Inscription
This congregation organized about 1865, twenty years after members of the Peters Colony began settling here. In 1874 the church deacons purchased land at this site from George W. and Alice B. Merchant. A one-room frame chapel was constructed here the following year under the supervision of A. W. Cooke. Additions to the structure were completed later. Active in the support of many programs, the church was also instrumental in the formation of a congregation in the nearby community of Aubrey (7 miles south) in 1959. (1981)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
This congregation formed around 1865, two decades after families of the Peters Colony began homesteading the Pilot Point area of Denton County. In 1874 the deacons bought this ground, and the next year raised a one-room frame chapel under builder A. W. Cooke, expanding it as membership grew. Long a fixture of local life, the church helped organize a sister congregation in nearby Aubrey in 1959.
Why it matters
It reflects how frontier churches anchored the empresario-colonized settlements of North Texas and knit scattered farming families into lasting communities.
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Related people
- · A. W. Cooke
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
City of Pilot Point
Pilot Point, TX
In the late 1840s, pioneers drawn by rich soil, water, and game settled at the edge of Texas's Cross Timbers, near a high stand of timber that guided travelers and gave the town its name. Platted in 1854 and served by an early immigrant trail and the Butterfield stage route, Pilot Point grew into a market hub for farmers and stock raisers, gaining a seminary, newspaper, bank, grist mill, and cotton gin. The arrival of two railroads in the 1880s cemented its place as a regional trade center.
Skinner Cemetery
Pilot Point, TX
In Pilot Point's early days, Lucinda and Richard Skinner set aside two and a half acres for a cemetery, and the first recorded burial—five-year-old Josiah Taylor—came in 1858. Most of those laid to rest were Protestant families from Kentucky, Virginia, Missouri, Arkansas, and Tennessee who had followed the frontier westward to farm and ranch. The stones record the hazards of the age, including sisters lost to the yellow fever epidemic of 1872–73, and by 1900 the ground held perhaps 200 graves.
Belew Cemetery
Aubrey, TX
Around 1856 Richard and Mary Jane Belew led their family and 39 other households by wagon from Tennessee to a hilltop north of Aubrey, founding the Belew Schoolhouse settlement. The community bought its first burial ground from Belew in 1880, and more than 70 red-sandstone markers still note its earliest graves. In 1902 a Ladies Cemetery Society formed, and its 85-year run of Thanksgiving dinners funded new land, a sexton's house, and a pavilion; veterans from the Civil War to the Gulf War lie here.
First Christian Church of Aubrey
Aubrey, TX
The Disciples of Christ in this area first worshipped alongside other denominations under a brush arbor and in a schoolhouse in the Spring Hill community before establishing their own Christian church in Aubrey in October 1894. A frame sanctuary served the congregation until a tornado leveled it in 1918, after which members quickly rebuilt while sustaining their missions and charitable work. An early emphasis on Bible schools fueled rapid growth and set the congregation's long course of worship and outreach.