Duffau Baptist Church

Duffau at its height was a real town. The Handbook of Texas describes it by the mid-1880s as a flourishing place of about 350 people, with steam flour mills and cotton gins, four churches, a hotel, a district school, three doctors and two deputy sheriffs. Railroad routes bypassed it, and by the mid-1890s decline had begun. In 1940 it kept a post office, seven businesses and 110 residents; by 1980 the count was seventy-six, a level still reported in 2000. The Baptists organized in 1878, while that growth was under way.

What the plaque says

Duffau Baptist Church On Sunday, October 6, 1878, elders A. W. Elledge, O. W. Hughart, and D. Shipman began this fellowship with 17 charter members. Elder Elledge served as the first pastor, conducting services on one Saturday and Sunday of each month. Soon after organizing, members furnished material and erected a sanctuary at this site. After a fire destroyed that building in 1935, this facility was completed. The membership reached about 125 before Duffau School consolidated with Hico in 1960 and the settlement declined. This is the only active church. (1979)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Dinosaur Valley State Park — 17 mi
  Theropod and sauropod trackways of about 113 million years ago in the bed of the Paluxy River, a National Natural Landmark where R. T. Bird found the first distinct sauropod tracks in 1937.
• Dublin Bottling Works — 19 mi
  The Erath County plant that bottled Dr Pepper with cane sugar from 1891 until a 2012 settlement ended its Dr Pepper license, and that still makes its own sodas the same way.
• Meridian State Park — 23 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.
• Acton State Historic Site — 32 mi
  The smallest state historic site in Texas, a grave plot holding Elizabeth Crockett, widow of David Crockett, under a 1913 statue of a pioneer woman shading her eyes toward the west.

More markers nearby

• Duffau Cemetery — 1.4 mi
• The Rev. Henry Hurley — 1.5 mi
• Selden — 6.6 mi
• Clairette Cemetery — 7.3 mi