The Rev. G. W. Bounds
Wortham, Freestone County, Texas
Marker Inscription
(January 25, 1854 - November 13, 1944) Born in Hickory, Miss. Family came to Texas, 1864. Preached his first sermon in 1880. Was ordained in 1890. Helped organize and was charter member of the Wortham Methodist Church. Instrumental in organizing area churches and serving their people. Beloved for good works.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Born in Mississippi in 1854, G. W. Bounds came to Texas with his family in 1864 and preached his first sermon in 1880, gaining ordination a decade later. He was a charter member who helped organize the Wortham Methodist Church and was instrumental in founding congregations across the surrounding country. Beloved for his good works, he served the region's faithful until his death in 1944.
Why it matters
Circuit-riding and church-planting ministers like Bounds knit scattered rural Texans into communities, and his ninety years span the state's transformation from frontier to modern age.
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Related people
- · G. W. Bounds
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
United Methodist Church of Wortham
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Organized in 1867 by the Rev. J. Hill Bounds, a Mississippi minister who had brought his family to Texas by ox-wagon two years earlier, this Methodist congregation first shared a two-story building with the local Masonic Lodge. His son T. A. Bounds later donated the central site where the present sanctuary rose in 1925. The church nurtured future bishop Kenneth Copeland, who led a revival here at seventeen.
Old Judge Allegre House
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Warren Allegre, who came to Wortham in 1869 and ran a nearby drugstore, built this Victorian house about 1895 while also giving music lessons, dispensing legal advice, and serving as justice of the peace and mayor. The home features handmade brick foundations and fireplaces, hand-carved woodwork, and two octagonal rooms, and was restored in 1968. It reflects the settled, small-town prosperity of Freestone County at the turn of the century.
Mrs. Lucy Haggard Longbotham
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Robert B. Longbotham
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