China Spring Tabernacle

Woodmen of the World Camp 707 met upstairs, and the order has its own origin story. According to Wikipedia, Joseph Cullen Root founded Modern Woodmen of America in Iowa in 1883 after a sermon about pioneer woodsmen clearing forests to provide for their families. Ousted, he started again in Omaha in 1890 as Woodmen of the World. The society sold fraternal insurance, and before 1930 it marked members' graves with tree-stump headstones. The Handbook says China Spring was founded in 1867 and named for a spring in a chinaberry grove.

What the plaque says

China Spring Tabernacle Constructed about 1903 on property deeded by Lavantia Conger, this two-story building has served as a civic center for the farming community of China Spring. An outside wooden staircase was removed when the structure was remodeled in 1934 by the Works Progress Administration. Camp 707 of the Woodmen of the World, organized in 1899, conducted meetings on the second floor until 1969. The Tabernacle has been used for school assemblies, church revivals, traveling shows, amateur theatricals, lectures, and political rallies. (1980)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Waco Mammoth National Monument — 8.3 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.
• Waco Suspension Bridge — 12 mi
  A Brazos crossing opened in January 1870 as the longest single-span suspension bridge west of the Mississippi, tolled until 1889, closed to vehicles in 1971 and now walked.
• Dr Pepper Museum — 12 mi
  The 1906 bottling plant of the Artesian Manufacturing and Bottling Company, built where Dr Pepper outgrew a Waco drugstore soda fountain, now the Dr Pepper Museum.
• Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum — 13 mi
  The official state repository of Texas Ranger memorabilia, opened in 1968 in Fort Fisher Park on the Brazos, named for a Ranger post of 1837 whose site no one has located.

More markers nearby

• China Spring Cemetery — 0.7 mi
• Bosque River Crossing of the 1841 Texan Santa Fe Expedition — 3.1 mi
• Gholson Cemetery — 5.9 mi
• Bosqueville Baptist Church — 6.8 mi