Second Baptist Church

🏛️The era

Pleasanton sits in Atascosa County, in the ranching and farming country just south of San Antonio. When a small group of Black residents gathered here in 1891 to organize a church, they were doing something that had swept across Texas and the South in the decades after Emancipation. Freedom had brought Black communities the right, for the first time, to worship on their own terms — and one of the first things they built, again and again, was a church of their own.

This was the Reconstruction and Gilded Age era, a time when Black Texans were laying the foundations of independent community life even as the promise of Reconstruction was giving way to hard limits on where they could go, learn, and belong. In small towns like Pleasanton, the Black church became far more than a place for Sunday services. It was meeting hall, school, relief society, and anchor all at once.

That this congregation later moved, rebuilt, and renamed itself across more than a century — from the 1890s through the Progressive era and into the modern age — is part of the story too. It grew up alongside the town, weathering the same decades of change that reshaped rural South Texas.

👥People & events

The founding gathering brought together Reverend James Ellis, Mrs. Fannie Lamont, Mrs. Lucky Ross, and others who wanted a Baptist home in Pleasanton. They chose the name Saint James Baptist Church and asked Reverend Ellis to serve as their first pastor. Later that same year the trustees bought a half-acre on East Adams Street from Elias Edmond and set about raising a building — an ordinary-sounding transaction that, for a Black congregation in 1891, meant securing a permanent foothold of their own.

Stability came with Reverend Hagood, who began his pastorate in 1903 and stayed for thirty-three years — the longest in the church's history. A tenure that long says something about the trust between a minister and his people, and about a congregation steady enough to hold together across a generation.

The hardest chapter came at mid-century. In 1950 the original building was torn down to make way for a larger, more modern one — but construction stalled, and in the waiting, discouraged members drifted away to worship elsewhere. A determined core refused to let the church die. They kept the congregation alive at a nearby mission church while they raised the money, and in 1953 they dedicated their new home and took a new name: Second Baptist Church. A few years later, around 1957, a former school building was moved onto the property to serve as the parsonage.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

The story of Second Baptist Church is the story of the Black church in America told in miniature. After the Civil War, congregations like this one became the first institutions that African Americans fully owned and governed — and from those pews came education, leadership, mutual aid, and the moral spine of community life for generations. When you multiply this single Pleasanton congregation by the thousands of others founded across the South in the same years, you begin to see how central these churches were to Black survival and self-determination.

The near-loss at mid-century matters just as much as the founding. Plenty of small congregations did not survive a stalled building project or a scattering of members. That this one did — because a handful of people were unwilling to quit — is a quiet example of the resilience that kept Black religious institutions standing through poverty, segregation, and change.

And the work continues in a recognizably American key: scholarships for young people, and hands-on help for neighbors in need through Christian Assistance Ministry. The church that began as a place to worship became, as so many did, a place to lift others up.

🧭If you visit

You'll find this marker in Pleasanton, in Atascosa County south of San Antonio, marking a congregation whose roots reach back to 1891. Stand at the site and it's worth remembering that the building in front of you is not the first — it's the one a stubborn, faithful core fought to build when an earlier one came down and the future looked uncertain.

Read the marker slowly and let the arc of it land: a founding gathering of neighbors, a half-acre bought with hard-earned money, a thirty-three-year pastor, a discouraging setback, and a comeback that gave the church both a new home and a new name. Those are the beats of a real community's life, not a museum piece.

If you're building a road trip through South Texas history, this is a good reminder that some of the most meaningful sites aren't grand monuments but living institutions still doing the work — teaching, helping, gathering — more than a century on. Pair a stop here with the small-town squares and country churches nearby, and you'll come away with a truer feel for how these communities were built and held together.

Be respectful of the fact that this is an active congregation and a working church, not just a historical marker; visit as a curious and courteous guest.