Chatfield United Methodist Church

The Methodists shared their first real building. A Navarro County church history says Capt. Robert Hodge gave land in 1852 for a two-story school, built of pine boards hauled from East Texas and ferried over the Trinity at Porter's Bluff, and the Methodist, Baptist and Christian congregations took turns using it. The Handbook of Texas says Hodge arrived in 1849 and was reported to own more than 1,280 acres and 100 enslaved people. A tornado wrecked the church on August 5, 1937; donors sent over $4,000, and Bishop Ivan Lee Holt dedicated its replacement in June 1938.

What the plaque says

Chatfield United Methodist Church In 1846, the Rev. J. E. Ferguson, whose son was to be a governor of Texas, preached to Methodists in this area. Robert Hodge, who founded Chatfield, built a brush arbor and let camp meetings be held at his spring. In 1858 he donated a site for a lodge hall, where all faiths worshipped for years. In 1886, Mr. and Mrs. Nail McMullan gave the Methodists a site for a church of their own. Peak membership came in 1896 under the Rev. George Clark. The original building was destroyed by a storm in 1937; the present one was completed in 1938. (1976)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Petroleum Industry Park — 11 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.
• Ellis County Courthouse — 28 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.

More markers nearby

• Francis Marion Martin — steps away
• General Lucian K. Truscott, Jr. — steps away
• Chatfield Baptist Church — 0.7 mi
• Last Review of the Confederacy — 1.3 mi