Avenue L Missionary Baptist Church

The congregation began in a balcony. In 1840 the white First Baptist Church set aside Sunday afternoons at three for enslaved worshipers, who sat in the gallery; the group later built a twenty-foot-square wooden church at Avenue L and 26th Street. After emancipation membership grew from 47 to about 500, and the 1900 hurricane destroyed the building and killed many members. Under Rev. H. M. Williams the congregation put up a replacement frame church in 1904 and a brick sanctuary completed in 1917, with members paying for art-glass windows, a pulpit and a baptismal pool.

What the plaque says

Avenue L Missionary Baptist Church One of the oldest black congregations in Texas, this church grew from the slave membership of the First Baptist Church of Galveston, organized in 1840 by the Rev. James Huckins. By the early 1850s the blacks were worshiping in a separate building. In 1855 land for use by the fellowship, then known as the African Baptist Church, was purchased from Galveston City Company by First Baptist trustees Gail Borden, Jr., James Huckins, and John S. Sydnor. Following the Civil War, the property was formally deeded to the congregation, reorganized under the leadership of the Rev. I. S. Campbell as the First Regular Missionary Baptist Church. About 1903, during the pastorate of the Rev. P. A. Shelton, the present name was adopted. Prominent pastors here have included the Rev. H. M. Williams, 1904-33, moderator of the Lincoln District Baptist Association; the Rev. g. L. Prince, 1934-56, later president of the National Baptist Convention and of Mary Allen College in Crockett, Texas; and the Rev. R. E. McKeen, 1957-78, who also served as moderator of the Lincoln District Association. Since the 1840s, members of the Avenue L Missionary Baptist Church have played a significant role in the religious and civic development of Galveston. (1981)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Moody Mansion — steps away
  A four-story, 28,000-square-foot house on Broadway, finished in 1895, that W. L. Moody Jr. bought just after the 1900 storm and his family kept until Hurricane Alicia in 1983.
• 1859 Ashton Villa — 0.3 mi
  A brick Italianate house on Broadway, built with enslaved labor in 1859, whose lawn has held Galveston's Juneteenth commemoration of General Orders, No. 3 every year since 1979.
• The Strand — 0.7 mi
  Five blocks of iron-front brick buildings near the harbor that were once called the Wall Street of the Southwest, emptied after 1900 and brought back by preservationists from the 1960s.
• Texas Seaport Museum and the Elissa — 0.8 mi
  An iron barque launched in Aberdeen in 1877 that called at Galveston twice, ended up smuggling in the Adriatic, and was bought back from a Greek scrapyard to sail again from Pier 22.

More markers nearby

• Jack Johnson — steps away
• Public Education for Blacks in Galveston — steps away
• Shiloh A. M. E. Church — steps away
• Olga Samaroff — 0.2 mi