United Presbyterian Church of Adamsville
Adamsville, Lampasas County, Texas
Marker Inscription
In late 1880, The Rev. McCall Smith and 19 charter members met in the home of L. Jasper and Mary Ann Townsen. They organized the Pleasant Valley Cumberland Presbyterian Church and held services in a schoolhouse or under a brush arbor. In 1903 "the tabernacle" was erected on camp grounds west of Adamsville. This meetinghouse was built in 1917 and the tabernacle was moved here in 1946 and used for several years. After a 1958 merger, this congregation became part of the United Presbyterian Church, U.S.A.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In late 1880, the Rev. McCall Smith and nineteen charter members gathered in a family home to organize the Pleasant Valley Cumberland Presbyterian Church, worshiping in a schoolhouse and under a brush arbor. A tabernacle rose on camp grounds in 1903, this meetinghouse was built in 1917, and after a 1958 merger the congregation joined the United Presbyterian Church, U.S.A.
Why it matters
The congregation's brush-arbor beginnings and enduring meetinghouse reflect how frontier communities built their social and spiritual life across generations of rural Texas.
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Related people
- · McCall Smith
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
John Patterson House
Adamsville, TX
John Patterson was, by tradition, the first man to break ground for crops in the county back in 1854, and he later served as a frontier Minute Man during the Civil War, guarding the settlements while other men marched away. The home he built in 1879–1880 stands as a monument to that pioneering life. It marks the transition from raw frontier to established farmstead.
Adamsville
Adamsville, TX
Settlement of this Lampasas County community began just before the county organized in 1856, and it grew around Oliver Hazzard Perry Townsen's flour mill on the Lampasas River. By the 1880s the crossroads had steam mills, churches, a school, and a general store whose partners, John T. Adams and Rev. McCall Smith, gave rise to the platted town of Adamsville in 1908. Over the following century it evolved from a frontier milling settlement into a close-knit rural community of fiddling jams and community barbecues.
Townsen's Mill
Adamsville, TX
Built on Mill Branch in 1872, Perry and Jasper Townsen's steam-powered mill cut rough "rawhide" lumber and ground the wheat and corn of surrounding farmers. A post office opened in 1881 and moved in 1891 to John Adams's store in nearby Adamsville, where the Rev. McCall Smith built and pastored the area's earliest Presbyterian church. The mill was the practical heart around which a small Lampasas County community formed.
Townsen Cemetery
Adamsville, TX
When Oliver Hazard Perry Townsen, 'Uncle Perry,' arrived in Texas in 1854 and settled along the Lampasas River, his family soon followed and built a mill that anchored a growing community. The cemetery began in 1875 with the burial of a four-year-old Townsen child and grew to hold nearly 300 graves, among them legislators, a county commissioner, a Texas Ranger, and dozens of veterans. Uncle Perry himself, who lost an arm in one mill accident and his life in another in 1891, rests here in the ground his family gave to the county.