Decker United Methodist Church and Community

Decker lies three miles west of Manor in northeastern Travis County. The Handbook records that a Methodist church was established there before 1900, and that in 1907 the Decker school had two teachers and sixty-one students. The school was consolidated with the Manor Independent School District in 1943. In the 1940s county highway maps showed a church, a cemetery and several houses at Decker. By the 1980s the name marked a junction on a branch line of the Southern Pacific at Walter E. Long Lake.

What the plaque says

Decker United Methodist Church and Community First settlers in this area on Decker Creek were Swedish immigrants, who attended church in Austin from 1867 to 1870s. Beginning in 1871, the Rev. C. C. Charnquist of Austin preached in homes. With advent of more settlers, a church was erected and dedicated at Pentecost, 1879. In 1882, a public school was opened. In 1884, the church was enlarged and a parsonage built. In the Pastorate (1901-02) of the Rev. C. O. Freeman, the present sanctuary was erected. The large modern wing was added in 1967. (1973)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• LBJ Presidential Library — 6.9 mi
  A ten-story travertine archive on the University of Texas campus holding 45 million pages from a presidency of civil rights laws, the War on Poverty and Vietnam.
• George Washington Carver Museum — 7.0 mi
  East Austin's museum of Black history and culture, grown from a segregated branch library moved across town in 1933, with a permanent exhibit on Juneteenth at its core.
• Texas State Cemetery — 7.2 mi
  A hill east of the Capitol that began with one general's grave in 1851 and now holds Stephen F. Austin, governors, Barbara Jordan and more than 2,000 Confederate veterans and widows.
• French Legation State Historic Site — 7.5 mi
  A raised pine house built in 1840 and 1841 for France's envoy to the Republic of Texas, who left Austin in a rage over a neighbor's pigs before it was finished.

More markers nearby

• Clayton Vocational Institute — 3.8 mi
• City of Manor — 4.2 mi
• Annie Webb Blanton — 4.4 mi
• Manor Cemetery — 4.5 mi