Bethesda Baptist Church

Bishop College, which members of this congregation helped organize in 1881, depended on a promise that came too late. The Handbook of Texas says Rufus Burleson asked Nathan Bishop, a New York native who ran the Providence and Boston school systems, for $25,000 about a decade earlier. Bishop pledged it and died before sending it. His wife, Carolina Caldwell Bishop, later gave $10,000 to begin construction. The school moved to Dallas in 1961, lost its accreditation in December 1986 and closed in 1988.

What the plaque says

Bethesda Baptist Church In 1867 the Rev. William Massey organized the "Colored Baptist Church" in his home. Soon the name "Bethesda" was chosen for the Biblical pool where the sick and troubled went for healing. Members of this congregation included prominent business, educational, and political leaders. They helped organize Bishop College in 1881. The first frame church house was razed in 1932 and a brick building was erected under the Rev. W. H. Dudley. After a fire destroyed the structure in 1953, this building was constructed during the pastorate of the Rev. James R. C. Pinn. (1979)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Texas and Pacific Railway Depot and Museum — 0.5 mi
  The only surviving building of the Texas and Pacific shops at Marshall, a 1912 Mission Revival depot saved from demolition in the 1990s, still an Amtrak stop, with a railway museum and a Mikado locomotive.
• Starr Family Home State Historic Site — 0.5 mi
  Maplecroft, the 1871 Greek Revival house Frank Starr built in Marshall, with Ruth Starr Blake's glass and china, an 1880s kitchen restored in 2019 and a retirement home built for a formerly enslaved person.
• Harrison County Historical Museum — 0.6 mi
  Galleries in Marshall's 1901 courthouse that run from the Caddo to the present, with Wiley College, Lady Bird Johnson's inaugural gown and a military gallery across the square in Memorial City Hall.
• Jefferson Historical Museum — 14 mi
  A four-floor museum in Jefferson's 1888-90 federal post office and courthouse, with rooms for African-American history, Jewish heritage, the Caddo and Diamond Bessie, bought by the historical society in 1965 for $8,100.

More markers nearby

• Site of Marshall University — 0.3 mi
• Bishop College — 0.3 mi
• Site of Temple Moses Montefiore — 0.3 mi
• First Baptist Church — 0.3 mi