Conway Community Church

The church moved here from a town that has nearly emptied. Conway grew from the Lone Star School of 1892, said to be the first rural school in the Panhandle that endured. J. D. Delzell and P. H. Fisher platted the town in 1905 on the Chicago, Rock Island and Gulf, naming it for former county commissioner H. B. Conway, and a steam threshing machine served its wheat farmers. The school district merged with Panhandle's in 1943, the post office closed by 1976, and the population fell from 175 in 1969 to twenty in 2000.

What the plaque says

Conway Community Church Residents of Conway, established 9 miles south of here in 1905, attended non-denominational services in a relocated schoolhouse until this union church building was completed in 1912. It became an important gathering place for the Conway Community and housed regular worship services until 1968. Membership in the congregation dwindled and the building fell into disrepair. Former church members and area volunteers devoted thousands of hours to restore this structure to its historic condition and relocate it here to the Square House Museum Complex in 1991. (1993)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Carson County Square House Museum — steps away
  The 1880s ranch cottage that is the oldest house in the town of Panhandle, at the heart of a twenty-one-building museum of the plains from mammoth hunters to the oil boom.
• Gem Theatre — 16 mi
  Claude's small-town movie house of 1915, restored by the Armstrong County Museum and remembered for the scene in Hud where Homer and Lonnie Bannon sing along to Clementine.
• Hutchinson County Museum — 23 mi
  Borger's museum on the three-mile Main Street of a 1926 oil boom town that drew 45,000 people in ninety days and was put under martial law in 1929.
• Lake Meredith National Recreation Area — 24 mi
  A Canadian River reservoir in 200-foot breaks, built to water the Panhandle's cities, that fell to a record 26 feet deep in 2013 and still rises and falls with the drought.

More markers nearby

• Texas Panhandle Pioneers - The Simms Brothers — steps away
• Old County Bookmobile, First "Inside Service" Bookmobile in Texas — steps away
• Last Great Panhandle Cattle Drive to Montana — steps away
• Finch-Lord-Nelson and the Founding of Panhandle City — steps away