Allen's Chapel Methodist Church and Cemetery

Allens Chapel began under the Arkansas Methodist Conference. A history submitted to the Texas Historical Commission says settlers along this part of the Red River were once counted in Miller County, Arkansas, so their churches answered to Arkansas Methodists until 1844, when northeast Texas churches moved to the East Texas Conference. A chart of preaching places drawn about 1852 listed Allens Chapel with 55 white and four Black members. Wilson Allen, who gave the land, held Second Class Land Certificates from the new county. The first marked burial in the cemetery is Margaret B. Massengale, in 1856.

What the plaque says

Allen's Chapel Methodist Church and Cemetery In 1842, a Methodist Episcopal Church, South, congregation organized and built a log chapel on land given by Wilson Allen. Early leaders were the Revs. J.H. Graham and J.W.P. McKenzie; trustees and family names included Allen, Hamil, Ramsey, Wheeler, Spence, Stroud, Meade, Dutton, Johnson, Cobb, Massengale and Prickett. The settlement was called Allen's Chapel Community. Due to declining attendance, the church disbanded in 1916. Ministering again to the larger church community, former members gave the church and its fixtures to the local Vineyard Grove Baptist congregation in 1926. The graveyard, still used and maintained by a community cemetery association, remains a landmark to the early settlement. (2002)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sam Rayburn House State Historic Site — 16 mi
  The two-story farmhouse west of Bonham that the longtime Speaker of the House built in 1916 and kept as his home, left as he lived in it and open as a museum since 1975.
• Sam Bell Maxey House State Historic Site — 22 mi
  The Italian-villa-style house in Paris, finished in 1868 with a lawyer's fees, where a Confederate major general turned U.S. senator and two later generations of his family lived.
• Evergreen Cemetery — 23 mi
  Paris's town cemetery since 1866, with a carved-stone gallery that includes the Babcock monument in cowboy boots, and the grave of the three-year-old whose death led to the 1893 lynching of Henry Smith.
• Eiffel Tower — 24 mi
  A 65-foot Eiffel Tower with a red cowboy hat, built by the local welders' union in 1993 beside Paris's Love Civic Center.

More markers nearby

• Vineyard Grove Baptist Church — 0.9 mi
• Erwin Evans Smith — 4.1 mi
• Oakwood Cemetery — 4.2 mi
• Samuel Augustus Erwin — 4.2 mi