Pleasant Grove Missionary Baptist Church
Maydelle, Cherokee County, Texas
Marker Inscription
This congregation was organized in 1854 and represents one of Cherokee County's oldest Baptist churches. The Rev. G. W. Slover served as first pastor. The first church building, erected here on land donated by Green B. Hill, was replaced with a frame sanctuary after the Civil War. Sunday School and other church facilities have been added over the years. Several early church members and their descendants are buried in the nearby Pleasant Grove Cemetery. The church, whose past membership has included several area civic leaders, continues to provide spiritual guidance for the area.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Organized in 1854, Pleasant Grove is among Cherokee County's oldest Baptist churches, first led by the Rev. G. W. Slover and meeting in a building on land donated by Green B. Hill. After the Civil War the original structure gave way to a frame sanctuary, and generations of members—including several area civic leaders—rest in the nearby Pleasant Grove Cemetery.
Why it matters
The church marks the deep antebellum roots of frontier East Texas settlement and the congregations that outlasted war to shape their communities.
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Related people
- · Rev. G. W. Slover
- · Green B. Hill
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Gent Village
Maydelle, TX
Perched atop Gent Mountain between two creeks, the village of Gent was settled in the 1850s by families from Alabama and Tennessee seeking good farmland. They quickly raised churches and schools, and by 1900 the village supported stores, mills, and cotton gins. But when the Texas State Railroad bypassed it and the town of Maydelle was founded nearby in 1910, business drained away, and today not a single structure of Gent remains.
Benge Cemetery
Maydelle, TX
George Clinton Benge moved from Alabama to this part of Cherokee County in 1850 with his wife Nancy and seven of their children, working as a farmer, blacksmith, and gunsmith and serving as a justice of the peace at Old Jacksonville. When Nancy died in 1861 he opened this burial ground on his own property. Family members interred here contributed to Jacksonville and neighboring communities, and a cemetery association tends the grounds today.
Little Bean's Cherokee Village
Rusk, TX
In the winter of 1819–1820, Chief John Bowles led about sixty Cherokee families from Arkansas into East Texas, and near this site a leader named Little Bean founded a small settlement. The community lived here for two decades until 1839, when the Republic of Texas forced the Cherokee to remove to Indian Territory in present Oklahoma; Little Bean, who died that year, is believed to be buried nearby, and the land was later opened to Anglo settlers.
Rocky Springs Missionary Baptist Church
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Just three years after Texas joined the Union, a group of newly arrived settlers gathered in Thomas J. Lindsey's home in 1848 to organize this Baptist congregation under Elder Walter Ross. The bubbling springs nearby likely gave the church its name, and a log cabin soon rose on the site as a place of worship. Its first pastor, the Rev. George Washington Slover, was said to have built the Atlanta hotel later depicted in the novel "Gone with the Wind."