Bethel Methodist Church

The parsonage this plaque mentions came from Boz, a school-and-church settlement five miles southwest of Waxahachie. The Handbook of Texas says Boz had a post office from 1891 to 1906 and a school that closed in 1943. It also says a Bethel Methodist Church in Boz served as a set for scenes in the film Places in the Heart (1984); this marker does not say whether that is the same church. When Ellis County was picked for the Superconducting Super Collider, Boz's few residents feared for the town, and by 1992 only one remained.

What the plaque says

Bethel Methodist Church In 1853 Bethel Church was begun under a brush arbor at High Springs. After meeting in a log school building at Greathouse, services were moved in 1860 to a schoolhouse at Bethel on Baker's Branch. The first meetinghouse, built south of the cemetery in 1872, was destroyed in an 1892 storm. The second, located north of the cemetery, was replaced in 1924 by the present sanctuary. The tabernacle, built in 1907, served for camp meetings and God's Acre sales. A parsonage, erected in the early 1900s on E.M. Brack's land at Boz, was moved to this site in 1952. (1979)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Ellis County Courthouse — 7.3 mi
  J. Riely Gordon's courthouse of 1897 in Pecos red sandstone and pink granite, with twenty-one carved stone faces and two cornerstones left by a quarrel over its building.
• Hill County Courthouse — 23 mi
  Wesley C. Dodson's limestone Second Empire courthouse of 1890 on the Hillsboro square, gutted by fire on New Year's Day 1993 and rededicated in 1999 after a rebuilding that two Willie Nelson concerts helped pay for.
• Cedar Ridge Preserve — 24 mi
  A 633-acre Audubon Dallas preserve at the western edge of Dallas County, with about nine miles of trails through prairie, woodland and escarpment hills.
• Petroleum Industry Park — 30 mi
  The pipes and drilling tower mark where a city water well struck oil on June 9, 1894, the start of the first Texas field to produce oil and gas in important quantities.

More markers nearby

• Greathouse Community, Church, and Cemetery — 2.0 mi
• Shawnee Cattle Trail — 3.8 mi
• Chambers' Creek — 4.6 mi
• Cotton Industry in Ellis County — 4.7 mi