Ash Creek Baptist Church

Ash Creek has made a habit of starting other churches. When Texas Baptists reported on the congregation's 150th anniversary in 2021, it had helped plant eleven churches in the Azle area. One, a Spanish-language congregation, got a start-up grant, hymnals, Bibles and the use of Ash Creek's buildings until it could stand on its own. For the anniversary members set up a museum of church records in the 1891 meeting house, then walked to the cemetery behind it, where seventeen of the 48 charter members are buried, and read their names aloud while laying flowers.

What the plaque says

Ash Creek Baptist Church On September 9, 1871, the Rev. J.C. Powers led 48 charter members in organizing Ash Creek Missionary Baptist Church. Guarding against Indians, Rev. Powers preached with a gun beside his Bible and men kept rifles on their knees. A meeting house was erected at this site in 1891 under the Rev. T.H. Sturges. In summers, brush arbors were built and prayer meetings held on the grounds. The women sold all eggs laid on Sundays to buy Sunday school literature. In 1965 a new auditorium was built and the original structure used for a Fellowship Hall. (1979)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fort Worth Stockyards — 13 mi
  The brick-street cattle market where Armour and Swift built packing plants in 1902, now a National Register district with a Coliseum, a museum and a longhorn drive twice a day.
• Kimbell Art Museum — 14 mi
  Louis Kahn's cycloid-vaulted museum of 1972, built from Kay Kimbell's bequest and joined in 2013 by Renzo Piano's pavilion for the exhibitions the Kahn galleries could not hold.
• National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame — 14 mi
  A hall of fame begun in Hereford in 1975 to honor rodeo women, widened in 1977 to Western heritage, and housed in Fort Worth's Cultural District since 2002.
• Tarrant County Courthouse — 15 mi
  A pink-granite courthouse of 1895 on the bluff where the Army set up Fort Worth in 1849, in a county named for the man who led the 1841 attack on the Native villages of Village Creek.

More markers nearby

• Ash Creek Cemetery — steps away
• First Methodist Church of Azle — 0.4 mi
• Coho and Nancy Jane Smith Farmstead Site — 1.1 mi
• Kiowa Raid on Walnut Creek — 2.7 mi