Willingham Spring Baptist Church
Salado vicinity, Bell County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Willingham Springs Baptist Church was organized in 1911 with the aid of Brother Cullam, pastor of Prairie Dell Methodist Church. Local farmer Wilson Willingham deeded property on this site. Oral history relates that Hanna Elizabeth "Grandma" Kidd Myers drove the first nail in the new church building. Area farmers Jim and Bennie Brooks, John and Zola Kidd Lankford, Mart and Minnie Brinegar Van Dyke, H. L. and Clemie Kidd Thomas, and Author and Eula Housewright helped build the structure, which was completed in 1914 and also served as a community schoolhouse until 1937. The church was closed in 1941, but was revitalized in the early 1950s and again in the 1990s. (1998)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In 1911 a handful of central Texas farm families organized this rural Baptist congregation on land deeded by a local farmer, raising a frame building that neighbors finished with their own hands by 1914. In the way of many country churches, the same walls doubled as the community schoolhouse into the 1930s. The congregation closed and revived more than once across the twentieth century, a rhythm of decline and renewal familiar to small farming settlements.
Why it matters
Country churches like this were the social and educational heart of scattered farm communities, and its story of neighbors literally building their own institutions captures how rural America knit itself together.
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Related people
- · Wilson Willingham
- · Hanna Elizabeth Kidd Myers
Themes & tags
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