The Rev. Noah Turner Byars
Brownwood, Brown County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Noah T. Byars (1808-1888) played an integral role in the establishment of the Baptist denomination in Texas. Born in Spartanburg, South Carolina, he arrived in Texas in the early 1830s and set up a blacksmith/gunsmith shop at Washington-on-the-Brazos, where delegates met and adopted the Declaration of Independence from Mexico on March 2, 1836. Immediately following the declaration, Byars was appointed armorer of the Texas army. Following victory at San Jacinto, he served as sergeant-at-arms of the Texas Senate and justice of the peace in Travis County. A charter member of the Baptist church established at Washington-on-the-Brazos in 1838, Byars was ordained to preach on October 16, 1841. The Baptist State Convention appointed Byars as its first missionary in 1848. Credited with founding more than 60 churches and four Baptist associations, Byars devoted the last 40 years of his life to establishing congregations on the Texas frontier. He helped organize the First Baptist Church of Brownwood in 1876. After moving permanently to Brownwood in 1882, Noah Byars began writing letters to other Baptist ministers urging the creation of a Baptist college in central Texas. That idea was brought to fulfillment under the leadership of Dr. John D. Robnett, pastor of Brownwood's First Baptist Church, with the opening of Howard Payne College in 1889, one year after Byars' death. He is buried in Brownwood's Greenleaf Cemetery. (2001)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Noah T. Byars, a South Carolina–born blacksmith and gunsmith, set up shop at Washington-on-the-Brazos, where Texas delegates adopted their Declaration of Independence in 1836—after which he was named armorer of the Texas army. Ordained a Baptist preacher in 1841 and appointed the state convention's first missionary in 1848, he is credited with founding more than 60 churches across the Texas frontier. He helped organize Brownwood's First Baptist Church and championed the Baptist college that opened as Howard Payne in 1889, a year after his death.
Why it matters
Byars links the birth of the Texas Republic to the religious and educational institutions that followed the frontier westward, one blacksmith who helped arm a revolution and then build its churches and colleges.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Noah T. Byars
- · John D. Robnett
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Antioch Cemetery
Blanket, TX
Antioch Cemetery grew out of a late-19th-century farming community in Brown County, on land the Grazier family deeded to the county in 1880 for schooling and burials. A combined church-and-school building nearby made the site a hub of frontier community life before the district eventually folded into the Blanket schools. Its earliest marked graves date to 1881, and among those interred are Civil War veterans and other pioneers who built the settlement.
Site of Chesser Valley Community
Mullin, TX
Chesser Valley took its name from John Dan Chesser, a Missouri native who came to Texas in 1854 and, after serving in the Texas State Troops during the Civil War, homesteaded 160 acres here with his wife Elizabeth. Their expanding log home doubled as church, hospital, and travelers' hotel, and the valley became a gathering place for camp meetings where families came by wagon to worship under a brush tabernacle. A one-teacher school opened in 1868, but after the Chesser house burned in 1926 the little community all but vanished.
Community of Sidney
Sidney, TX
Sidney took shape around 1870 when early settlers located along Jimmie's Creek, building a log schoolhouse by a spring in 1877 that also hosted the town's Methodist, Baptist, and Church of Christ congregations in turn. A store, post office (named for a storekeeper's son), and Holstein dairy herds followed, and by the early 1900s the town had doctors, drug stores, and a telephone exchange. It also basked in the fame of nearby Round Mountain, the first field laboratory of world-renowned geologist Dr. Robert T. Hill.
Duren Cemetery
Mullin, TX
Philip David Duren bought 390 acres here in 1876 and raised a log home, bringing his family from Houston County. His infant daughter Willie Lee, buried in 1878, was the first laid to rest in what became the community cemetery. Duren deeded land for a school that ran until 1947 and, in 1912, guaranteed free burial plots and a church open to all denominations; Pompey Mountain Church still serves the area.