Pleasant Glade Baptist Church
Colleyville, Tarrant County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Pleasant Glade Baptist Church, also known as Pleasant Glade Missionary Baptist Church, was organized September 19, 1923, in the historic Pleasant Glade community. The fourteen charter members were all formerly of Pleasant Run Baptist Church (organized in 1877). Several other members joined that day, and the newly ordained Reverend O. M. Heflin later became first pastor. The congregation purchased an existing frame church building at Cottonwood, northeast of Grapevine, and relocated it to this site. Their first revival meeting was held on September 24, 1924, and inspired thirty people to join the church. During the Depression era, the congregation persevered and continued to grow. As a rural farming community, they were better able to cope with the difficult financial times than their city cousins. By the end of World War II, the church was prosperous enough to build a parsonage, completed in 1947. Improvements to the church building and additions to the land were made in the late 1940s and early 1950s and continued as needed thereafter. The congregation was renamed First Baptist Church of Pleasant Glade on July 4, 1956. A few days later they began a mission church in the nearby town of Hurst. The mission flourished and became Bellevue Baptist Church within a year. A modern church facility was completed in 1963. The Pleasant Glade Baptist Church continues in the traditions of its founders. Its programs include youth and community outreach, men's and women's groups, and missionary support. The church continues to serve northeastern Tarrant County. (2000)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Pleasant Glade Baptist Church was organized in September 1923 by fourteen charter members drawn from the older Pleasant Run Baptist Church, settling into a frame building they moved from Cottonwood to this rural site. As a farming community, its members weathered the Great Depression better than their city neighbors and kept growing, building a parsonage by 1947 and a modern facility by 1963. Renamed First Baptist Church of Pleasant Glade in 1956, it even spun off a mission that became Bellevue Baptist Church.
Why it matters
The congregation's resilience through the Depression and its role in seeding new churches show how rural faith communities anchored and reproduced themselves across northeastern Tarrant County.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
Pleasant Glade Baptist Church was organized on September 19, 1923, in a farming community in northeastern Tarrant County — a landscape of fields and small settlements in the years just before the Great Depression. This was the tail end of a long era of rural self-reliance, when a community's church, like its schoolhouse and its general store, was something neighbors built with their own hands and sustained through their own labor.
The congregation didn't spring from nowhere. Its fourteen charter members had all belonged to the older Pleasant Run Baptist Church, which had been organized back in 1877. That lineage matters: the pioneer faith of the 1870s was, by the 1920s, mature enough to branch and multiply. A daughter congregation forming from an established one is a sign of a rooted, healthy community putting out new growth.
What lay just ahead would test that community severely. The stock market crash of 1929 and the long Depression that followed devastated cities and farms alike — but as the marker notes, a rural farming community often weathered those years better than its city cousins. When money vanished, families who could still grow their own food and rely on their neighbors had a resilience that wage earners in the cities simply did not.
People & events
The founding had the feel of an occasion. On that September day in 1923, the fourteen charter members were joined by several others who signed on then and there, and the newly ordained Reverend O. M. Heflin stepped forward to become the congregation's first pastor. A brand-new minister and a brand-new church, beginning together — it's a fitting image of shared beginnings.
One of the congregation's first practical acts tells you a great deal about frontier resourcefulness. Rather than build from scratch, they purchased an existing frame church building at Cottonwood, northeast of Grapevine, and physically relocated it to this site. Moving a whole building was hard, communal work, and it says that these were people who solved problems with their hands and their neighbors' shoulders.
The young church announced itself with a revival. Held on September 24, 1924, that first revival meeting inspired thirty people to join — an enormous surge for a small country congregation, and the kind of event that could set a church's course for a generation. Through the lean Depression years the congregation not only persevered but continued to grow, and by the end of World War II it was prosperous enough to build a parsonage, completed in 1947. Improvements and additions followed through the late 1940s and 1950s, and on July 4, 1956, the congregation took a new name: First Baptist Church of Pleasant Glade. Only days later it planted a mission church in nearby Hurst — a mission that flourished so quickly it became Bellevue Baptist Church within a year. A modern facility followed in 1963.
Its place in the American story
Pleasant Glade's history illuminates two truths about American life that a history book can only tell in the abstract. The first is how differently the Great Depression fell on the countryside than on the city. The marker's own observation — that a rural farming community was better able to cope than its urban counterparts — is a lived example of something economists have long noted: land, food, and tight-knit mutual aid were a cushion that pavement and payrolls could not provide.
The second is the remarkable way American churches reproduce themselves. Pleasant Glade was born as an offshoot of an older congregation, then in turn seeded a mission that grew into a church of its own within a year. That branching pattern — parent to daughter to granddaughter — is how faith communities spread across the growing suburbs of postwar America, each new congregation both an inheritance and a fresh start.
Set against the national timeline — the Roaring Twenties, the Depression, the Second World War, the postwar boom — this one country church quietly lived through all of it and came out the other side larger and stronger. Its persistence is a small, honest measure of how ordinary institutions carried communities through the century's hardest passages.
If you visit
Come here with the whole hundred-year arc in mind, and the ordinary setting takes on real depth. This was open farming country when fourteen people carried their faith over from an older church and hauled a wooden sanctuary across the countryside to plant it on this ground. Northeastern Tarrant County has since filled in with suburbs, which makes the continuity all the more striking.
Think, too, about the connections that radiate outward from this single spot. The mission this congregation launched in Hurst became Bellevue Baptist Church; the church's own roots reach back to Pleasant Run in 1877. A place that looks like one modest congregation is really a hub in a family tree of Texas churches — a good thing to reflect on while you stand at the marker.
For a road tripper exploring the historic communities that were folded into the modern Mid-Cities, Pleasant Glade is a rewarding stop. It rewards the traveler who likes to trace how the small, scattered settlements of old Tarrant County — Cottonwood, Grapevine, Hurst, Pleasant Glade — grew into the busy suburbs of today, with these churches as the threads that connect then to now.
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
- · O. M. Heflin
Themes & tags
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