St. Paul United Methodist Church
Port Arthur, Jefferson County, Texas
Marker Inscription
In 1915, Reverend S.D. Hackett introduced Methodism to the historic westside of Port Arthur, creating Hackett Chapel, a black Methodist church, with seventeen faithful members. The “prayer band” began meeting at the Ila Hall on West 7th Street and then in members’ homes. Hackett Chapel officially went on the Gulf Coast Black Conference Record in 1920 as St. Paul Methodist Episcopal Church. The first church was erected through a grant from the Board of Home Missions from Port Arthur College in 1920 at 848 Lincoln Avenue and opened in 1926. In 1964, as church membership continued to grow, the church trustees began negotiations to purchase the O.C.A.W. Hall – local 254, located at 821 Texas Avenue, as the new church location. On Sunday, November 14, 1965, the first church service was held at the new location and was led by Bishop Noah W. Moore, Jr., resident bishop of the southwestern area. In 1968, Reverend Hubert B. Liedy, Jr., led the church through the United Methodist Church integration process. Through this merger, the church name changed to St. Paul United Methodist Church. Despite their small congregation, St. Paul United Methodist Church served and continues to serve the Westside community and beyond through many service programs, including local and foreign missions, clothing, food and school supply drives, youth mentoring and tutoring, and weekly meals for local residents. Locally and globally, the St. Paul United Methodist Church has served as a beacon of hope for over a century. (2017)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In 1915 the Rev. S.D. Hackett brought Methodism to the historically Black westside of Port Arthur, gathering seventeen faithful members as Hackett Chapel. Recorded in 1920 as St. Paul Methodist Episcopal Church, the congregation built its first church on Lincoln Avenue and, through the 1968 merger that created the United Methodist Church, became St. Paul United Methodist Church. For over a century it has anchored the Westside through missions, food and clothing drives, and youth programs.
Why it matters
As a Black church founded in the Jim Crow South, St. Paul stood as a center of faith, mutual aid, and community strength for Port Arthur's Westside.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In 1915, Port Arthur was a young, booming refinery town on the upper Texas coast, pulled into being by the great Spindletop oil strike a few years earlier. Work drew people from across the South, and among those who came and stayed were Black families who settled and built lives on the city’s historic Westside. This was the Jim Crow era, when segregation shaped nearly every public institution — which meant a Black community that wanted a church of its own had to raise it with its own hands.
Methodism arrived on that Westside through one determined minister and a very small band of the faithful. The Progressive-era South was a place of hard limits for Black Texans, but it was also a place where the church became far more than a house of worship: it was the one institution a community fully owned and controlled.
Into that world came the Reverend S.D. Hackett, and the seventeen people willing to pray with him.
People & events
It began as a “prayer band.” In 1915 Reverend Hackett gathered seventeen members as Hackett Chapel, meeting first at the Ila Hall on West 7th Street and then, more intimately, in one another’s homes. By 1920 the little fellowship had earned a formal place on the Gulf Coast Black Conference record under a new name: St. Paul Methodist Episcopal Church.
That same period brought a first permanent home. With the help of a Home Missions grant, land was secured on Lincoln Avenue, and by 1926 the congregation had a church building of its own to gather in. For a small Black congregation in the segregated South, raising that first sanctuary was an achievement measured in years of saving and sacrifice.
The most striking chapter came in the 1960s. As membership grew, the trustees set their sights on a larger home — and the building they bought was a labor union hall, the O.C.A.W. Hall of Local 254 on Texas Avenue. On Sunday, November 14, 1965, they held their first service there, led by Bishop Noah W. Moore, Jr. A short time later, in 1968, the Reverend Hubert B. Liedy, Jr. guided the church through a national merger; through it the congregation became St. Paul United Methodist Church.
Its place in the American story
St. Paul’s story is a window onto two of the largest currents in twentieth-century American life. The first is the Black church as the anchor of community — the place where a people denied full standing in the wider society built their own institution of faith, mutual aid, and dignity. That a Westside congregation could grow from a seventeen-member prayer band into a purchaser of property is a small, concrete measure of a community’s persistence under Jim Crow.
The second is the long, uneven road toward integration inside American institutions themselves. The 1968 merger that gave the church its present name was part of a nationwide reordering of American Methodism, one that formally dismantled a separate structure for Black congregations. When the marker speaks of the “integration process,” it is pointing to that larger reckoning, lived out at the level of one Texas church.
And there is the union hall. That a Black Methodist congregation in an oil and refinery town would find its permanent home in a former labor local’s hall quietly ties two great Southern stories — faith and industrial work — into a single address.
If you visit
Come to Port Arthur’s Westside with the marker’s long arc in mind: a prayer band in a rented hall, then homes, then a Lincoln Avenue sanctuary, and finally a repurposed union hall on Texas Avenue that has served as the church’s home since the mid-1960s. Reading those moves in sequence, you can feel a community steadily gaining ground.
Think about that union-hall origin as you take in the setting. This is a refinery town, and a building where oil and chemical workers once met their union became a place where a congregation meets its God — a fittingly hardworking pedigree for a hardworking neighborhood.
Port Arthur sits within easy reach of the wider Golden Triangle, so a stop here pairs naturally with the coast and the region’s deep oil-era history. Let the marker do what a good one should: send you looking at the Westside not as a place you’re passing through, but as a community that built and rebuilt its own beacon across more than a century.
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
- · S.D. Hackett
- · Noah W. Moore, Jr.
- · Hubert B. Liedy, Jr.
Themes & tags
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