Bethany Baptist Church

The plaque credits Roosevelt's Resettlement Administration with the neighborhood; a Farm Security Administration fact sheet shows how it was built. The Interior Department's Division of Subsistence Homesteads began Houston Gardens in the winter of 1933, and the Resettlement Administration took it over in May 1935 and finished it that November. On 320 acres of sandy loam it laid out 100 homesites of two to five acres, each with twelve fruit and nut trees and a fenced chicken yard. The homes were meant for low-income families working in Houston who could grow much of their own food.

What the plaque says

Bethany Baptist Church Bethany Baptist Church has played an important role as a spiritual and community leader in Houston. Though having strong connections with a separate Bethany Baptist Church founded in 1922, members organized this church as Houston Garden Baptist Church in 1935. It was structured by the Rev. Thomas W. White, the Rev. W.T. Turner and the Rev. M.M. Wolf. The Rev. Oscar E. Reifel served as its first pastor. The congregation erected a sanctuary in 1936, followed by a new house of worship in 1941. The church changed it name to Bethany Baptist in 1946. Members established the church in the Houston Gardens community. The federal government helped to create the neighborhood as part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Resettlement Administration, which worked to resettle low-income rural families to urban areas. By the 1970s, demographics in the area changed from predominately Anglo American to African American. During that time, Bethany was the only one of four predominately black churches in the Union Baptist Association that began as an all-white congregation to survive the era of change without merging or facing foreclosure. Bethany Baptist Church became an example of positive, successful institutional integration when the Rev. Curley Edward Carr, an associate pastor, became the congregation's first African American head pastor in 1971. Over the years, the Bethany Baptist congregation has experienced substantial growth and development. It continues to serve the surrounding area of northeast Houston as a spiritual, educational and community leader. (2006)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sam Houston Park and the Heritage Society — 6.3 mi
  Ten historic buildings gathered in a downtown park below the skyscrapers, among them the 1870 house of the Reverend Jack Yates, built five years after emancipation.
• Emancipation Park — 7.4 mi
  The Third Ward park that freedpeople bought for Juneteenth in 1872, rebuilt in 2017 on Emancipation Avenue and still the center of the city's June 19 celebration.
• Buffalo Soldiers National Museum — 7.8 mi
  A museum in Houston's 1925 Light Guard Armory that tells the service of Black soldiers from the Revolutionary War onward, built from one veteran's thirty years of collecting.
• Rothko Chapel — 8.4 mi
  An octagonal chapel open to all faiths, built by the de Menils around fourteen dark canvases by Mark Rothko, with Barnett Newman's Broken Obelisk standing in the pool outside.

More markers nearby

• Zydeco Music in Frenchtown — 3.3 mi
• Harris County Department of Education — 3.6 mi
• Mount Pleasant Baptist Church — 3.7 mi
• The Frenchtown Community — 3.8 mi