HistoricSiteMarkers
Early Republic

Snow Hill Baptist Church

Daingerfield, Morris County, Texas

Marker Inscription

Settlers began moving to this area, which they called Snow Hill, by the early 1840s. In 1852, local residents organized this congregation under the direction of the Rev. Samuel Morris. The first sanctuary, which also served as a community schoolhouse, was moved to this site about 1871. The land, including the adjacent cemetery, had been donated to the congregation the previous year by J. W. and Thurza Cason. Since before the Civil War, the Snow Hill Baptist Church has played a vital role in the development of the surrounding rural area.

Erected by Texas Historical Commission

The Story

Settlers reached the area they called Snow Hill by the early 1840s, and in 1852 residents organized a Baptist congregation under the Rev. Samuel Morris. The first sanctuary, doubling as a community schoolhouse, was moved to this site around 1871 on land — including the adjacent cemetery — donated by J. W. and Thurza Cason. The church has anchored the surrounding rural community since before the Civil War.

Why it matters

Serving as both church and schoolhouse, Snow Hill shows how a single building could hold together the religious and civic life of an antebellum Texas settlement.

Own a business near here? Add it to the map.

Related people

  • · Samuel Morris

Themes & tags

Nearby & related markers

Caddo Indian Communities in the Cypress Creek Drainage

Mount Pleasant, TX

For more than a thousand years, the Caddo peoples occupied a homeland spanning parts of present-day Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Oklahoma, building complex societies with ceremonial mound centers and sophisticated farming as early as A.D. 800. Early Spanish and French visitors recorded their customs and prized trade, but European diseases and later Anglo-American settlement devastated the population, and by the late 1850s the Caddo were forced to Indian Territory. Archaeologists studying village sites along Cypress Creek continue to recover the story of Caddo life from pottery, mounds, and burial patterns.

Center Grove Cemetery

Cookville, TX

First known as the Yancey Cemetery, this burial ground began in the mid-1860s on land donated by David Yancey, Sr., whose party had traveled from Tennessee to Texas—an orphaned infant from that group being the first laid to rest here. Many of the earliest graves are marked only with rough fieldstones. Renamed Center Grove in 1900 for the nearby Church of Christ, it holds veterans of the Civil War and both World Wars.

Ned Walker Home

Omaha, TX

Built in 1859 for pioneer J. G. Henderson, this East Texas house reflects the craftsmanship of the antebellum frontier, with hand-dressed pine floors and ceilings and oversized handmade interior doors. Later cared for by Mr. and Mrs. Ned Walker, it was recognized as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1967.

James Thompson

Daingerfield, TX

James Thompson served in the North Carolina militia in 1781, helping secure American independence, before joining the westward drift of pioneer families through Alabama and Mississippi to the young Republic of Texas, where he was revered as a patriarch. His kin carried that martial thread onward: a son-in-law fought in the War of 1812, and a grandson became a Texas Ranger and county sheriff, killed in an Indian fight. Thompson and many descendants rest in the Daingerfield Cemetery.