Saint John Baptist Church
Wichita Falls, Wichita County, Texas
Marker Inscription
In June 1884, the Grainger & Ballow Addition was platted in an area later called the Eastside, which became the center of the African American community of Wichita Falls. In this neighborhood in November 1905, Rev. W.M. Massey, Charles and Susan Frizzell Craft, Andrew Byrd, William Johnson and Lizzie Scott Richardson organized Saint John Baptist Church, the third congregation of the Black community. Mrs. Richardson is credited for naming the church. The first service was held at Titus Chapel C.M.E. Church. The church soon moved to the Odd Fellows Hall and a building fund campaign was initiated. A small wood frame building was erected on Park Street in 1906, but unfortunately burned in June 1913 while pastor William Washington served. A brush arbor, used for worship, was erected on the same lot. Under Rev. M.K. Curry, a basement was built and by 1917 a two-story brick sanctuary was completed with the first baptistery of the Eastside area churches. A four-room house behind the church was bought as the first parsonage. Saint John became a spiritual and social center for the community. During the devastating Great Depression of the 1930s, Rev. Moses P. Timms and six other ministers of the Eastside Ministerial Alliance sponsored the feeding of approximately two hundred people per day with meals served in the basement of Saint John. Rev. Theodore Smith was influential in building the first Black church-owned recreational community park with a concession stand in 1947. Property was purchased at 1009 Flood Street to erect a new church, dedicated in August 1958. Rev. L.D. Bell's son was the architect. In 1967, the church mortgage was paid off and a new three thousand-square-foot parsonage was built. Saint John Baptist Church, more than a century old, still remains a vital part of the Eastside community of Wichita Falls. (2019)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Organized in 1905 in the Eastside neighborhood that had become the heart of Black Wichita Falls, Saint John Baptist Church grew from a small frame building — burned in 1913 and rebuilt — into a brick sanctuary and a center of community life. Through the Great Depression its basement fed some two hundred people a day, and its congregation later built one of the area's first Black-owned recreational parks and a new church home dedicated in 1958.
Why it matters
For more than a century Saint John shows how the Black church served as spiritual anchor, social safety net, and civic institution for a segregated Southern community.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
The story of Saint John Baptist Church begins with a map. In June 1884, the Grainger & Ballow Addition was platted in the part of Wichita Falls that came to be called the Eastside — and over time that neighborhood became the heart of the city's African American community. To understand a marker like this, you have to picture that geography, because in the segregated South of the era, where Black families could live, worship, and gather was shaped as much by law and custom as by choice.
The congregation was organized in November 1905, at the opening of what historians call the Progressive Era — a time of national reform that, for Black Southerners, ran alongside the hardening walls of Jim Crow. Public life was closed off in a hundred ways, from schools to streetcars to the ballot box. In that world, the institutions a community could fully own became enormously important, and none mattered more than the church.
So when a handful of neighbors set out to found a new congregation, they weren't only starting a place to pray. They were building one of the few spaces where the Eastside could govern itself, care for its own, and be fully, unapologetically at home.
People & events
It took a founding circle to do it: Rev. W. M. Massey, Charles and Susan Frizzell Craft, Andrew Byrd, William Johnson, and Lizzie Scott Richardson, who is remembered for giving the church its name. Saint John was the third Black congregation in the community, and its early years read like a lesson in persistence. The first service was held in another church's home, Titus Chapel C.M.E.; the young congregation then worshiped in the Odd Fellows Hall while it raised a building fund.
A small wood-frame church rose on Park Street in 1906 — and then burned in June 1913. Rather than scatter, the members built a brush arbor, a rough open-air shelter of posts and branches, on the very same lot and kept worshiping. Under Rev. M. K. Curry they dug a basement and, by 1917, completed a two-story brick sanctuary with the first baptistery among the Eastside churches. A four-room house behind it became the first parsonage.
Then came the hardest test of all. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, Rev. Moses P. Timms and six fellow ministers of the Eastside Ministerial Alliance turned the church basement into a kitchen, feeding roughly two hundred people a day. Later, Rev. Theodore Smith helped build the first Black church-owned recreational park, with a concession stand, in 1947. A new church home on Flood Street was dedicated in August 1958 — designed by the son of Rev. L. D. Bell — and by 1967 the mortgage was paid off and a new parsonage built.
Its place in the American story
Saint John's century of ledgers and losses is one telling of a story that belongs to the whole nation. Across the segregated South, the Black church was never just a Sunday institution. It was the schoolhouse when schooling was denied, the bank when banks would not lend, the meeting hall when other halls were closed, and the relief agency when no other help came.
That Depression-era basement, serving two hundred meals a day, is the clearest window into why. When federal and local aid reached Black communities last and least, mutual aid organized through the church filled the gap. The Ministerial Alliance behind it — several congregations pooling their effort — is exactly the kind of self-reliant network that sustained Black America through its hardest decades and helped lay the groundwork for the civil rights movement that followed.
The park built in 1947 carries the same meaning. In a country where public recreation was segregated or off-limits, a community that couldn't use the town's amenities simply built its own. Saint John shows how a single congregation could be, at once, a sanctuary, a safety net, and a seat of civic life.
If you visit
This is a living church, not a museum, so visit with the respect you'd bring to any active house of worship. The reward for coming is understanding how much history a neighborhood corner can hold. Stand on the Eastside and let the timeline settle over the ground: a frame building, a fire, a brush arbor raised on the ashes, a brick sanctuary, and finally the church home dedicated in 1958.
Look for the ways a community wrote itself into its surroundings — the church, and the memory of the park that a congregation built when the public ones were closed to them. These are the fingerprints of people who refused to wait for permission to have a full life.
If you're traveling through Wichita Falls with an eye for the American story that doesn't always make the guidebooks, this is a stop that rewards a slow pause. More than a century on, Saint John is still here, still central to the Eastside — which is, in the end, the whole point of the marker.
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
- · Rev. W.M. Massey
- · Lizzie Scott Richardson
Themes & tags
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