Canaan Baptist Church

Frank Kiefer, a German boy selling cake and beer in Independence, slipped into a revival in 1854 where R. C. Burleson was preaching, though he could not follow the English. Texas Time Travel, a Texas Historical Commission program, tells the story. Kiefer became a Baptist minister, helped found Ebenezer Baptist Church at Burton in 1861, one of the first German Baptist churches in Texas, and is called the father of the North American Baptist movement in the state. By 1900 sixteen German Baptist churches stood in Texas, and Canaan was one of them.

What the plaque says

Canaan Baptist Church This congregation traces its history to 1891 when Germans in the Prairie Chapel community organized a Baptist church congregation in a local schoolhouse on property owned by Heinrich Englebrecht. Forty people became charter members at the community meeting. Worship services were held in homes and in the schoolhouse. In 1893 the Rev. Louis Vogt became the church's first full time pastor. The Rev. J.E. Sydow served as pastor from 1898 to 1901. In 1894 the congregation built a sanctuary at this site on land owned by Engelbrecht; he later donated the land to the church. Additional space for Sunday School classes and a tower and steeple were added to the original structure in 1928. Throughout the early years, all worship services were conducted in the German language. In 1933 members decided to have English services every second Sunday. By 1940, all services were conducted in English. Instead of building a new church, members decided to remodel the existing structure in 1949. Many descendants of original church members worship here along with others in the community. (1992)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Bosque Museum — 15 mi
  A Clifton museum holding what it calls the largest repository of Norwegian artifacts in the South and Southwest, with Bosque County finds some 10,000 years old and a log cabin built by the Olson family.
• Mother Neff State Park — 16 mi
  A Leon River park that grew from six acres Isabella Neff left the state in her 1921 will, where Civilian Conservation Corps Company 817 built a stone tower, a pavilion and roads in the 1930s.
• Waco Mammoth National Monument — 23 mi
  A bone bed on the Bosque River where a nursery herd of at least 19 Columbian mammoths was trapped and drowned by floodwater 65,000 to 72,000 years ago, left in place under a dig shelter.
• Meridian State Park — 24 mi
  A 505-acre park in Bosque County where World War I veterans of a Civilian Conservation Corps company dammed Bee Creek in 1933-34 for a 72-acre lake and cut stone buildings around it.

More markers nearby

• Prairie Chapel School — 0.8 mi
• St. John Lutheran Church — 1.9 mi
• Osage Cemetery — 2.6 mi
• Moore, John Creed — 2.6 mi