St. Phillips Episcopal
Hearne, Robertson County, Texas
Marker Inscription
W. B. Wadsworth (1843-1916) and J. G. Wilkerson (1847-1903) moved their families to the Hearne area from Matagorda. With their help, this church was founded in 1871. It was named in honor of the Rev. J. W. Philips who preached the first sermon. This property was donated to the congregation by the New York and Texas Land Company. Services were conducted in a wooden church building until the present Gothic revival structure was completed in 1912. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1979
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
When W. B. Wadsworth and J. G. Wilkerson moved their families to the Hearne area from Matagorda, they helped found this Episcopal church in 1871, naming it for the minister who preached its first sermon. A land company donated the property, and worshippers gathered in a wooden building until the present Gothic Revival sanctuary was completed in 1912. The church has stood as a Robertson County landmark ever since.
Why it matters
It reflects how families migrating within Texas after the Civil War planted enduring congregations and graceful architecture in the state's growing rail and farming towns.
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Related people
- · W. B. Wadsworth
- · J. G. Wilkerson
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
First Baptist Church of Hearne
Hearne, TX
Organized in 1869 as the Hearne Station Baptist Church with eleven charter members, this congregation grew through revivals and a gift of land from the incorporators of the Southern Pacific Railroad, raising its first sanctuary in 1877. It adopted the name First Baptist Church when a new auditorium's cornerstone was laid in 1907. Its founding beside a rail line typifies the church's role in a Reconstruction-era railroad town.
City of Hearne
Hearne, TX
Hearne sits on land first granted in 1830 to Francisco Ruiz, commander of the Mexican outpost Fort Tenoxtitlan on the Brazos frontier. An early tavern, stage stand, and post office served the region before Southern planters like Ebenezer and Horatio Hearne arrived in 1852 to work thousands of acres. When the Houston & Texas Central Railroad reached the site in 1868, Mrs. Christopher Columbus Hearne fulfilled her late husband's pledge by donating 700 acres, and the town platted in 1870 took the family's name.
Suggs Cemetery
Hearne, TX
Calvin A. Suggs brought his family from Georgia to this stretch of Robertson County around 1868, in the uncertain first years after emancipation, and set aside part of his eighty acres as a burying ground. For more than a century it has been the principal cemetery of the Black Jack community, its oldest marked grave dating to 1880. Beneath its marked and unmarked stones lie the pioneer settlers — many of them African American — who built a rural community out of Reconstruction-era Texas.
Ebenezer Hearne Cemetery
Hearne, TX
This burial ground adjoined the "Estate Place Plantation" of Ebenezer and Minerva Walker Hearne, part of a family that settled Robertson County in the 1850s and opened the cotton plantations that drove the area's early economy. Ebenezer, who died in 1869, lies here with Minerva, their daughter Icephena, and several children whose names went unrecorded. His brother Horatio's home stood a few miles south.