Eagle Springs Baptist Church

Eagle Springs supposedly got its name when a survey party watched an eagle fly up from the spring. The Handbook of Texas says a post office opened there in 1869. By 1884 the community reported three general stores, two churches, a district school and 200 residents, and area farmers shipped cotton and grain. Decline began in the 1890s. The post office closed in 1901 and mail went to Moody. The school was consolidated with a nearby one in 1936, and only a few scattered houses remained by the 1980s, two miles northwest of Mother Neff State Park.

What the plaque says

Eagle Springs Baptist Church This congregation grew from an early Coryell County fellowship known as the Church of Onion Creek. Worshippers met in a log building until it burned in 1854. In 1858 this site was acquired for a new church building. In the same year, the Rev. John McLain, a Baptist Missionary, organized the Eagle Springs Baptist Church from the earlier congregation. Charter members inclded J. H. and Nancy Estep; Evan A. and Tabitha Culpepper; Wyatt, Naomi and Serepha Hall; F. M. Elmira, and Mary Grimes; Daniel Jones; and C. S. and Zura Strickland. By 1880 Eagle Springs was a thriving community with two grocery stores, two doctors' offices, a post office, and a school. The congregation grew also, with many baptisms being held in the Leon River. During the first decades of the twentieth century, families began moving away form Eagle Springs. The community school was closed in 1935, and in 1948 members of Eagle Springs Baptist Curch voted to disband. The church building was retained, however, for reunions and occasional services. It is one of the few remaining structures in the Eagle Springs Community. (1984)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Mother Neff State Park — 1.3 mi
  A Leon River park that grew from six acres Isabella Neff left the state in her 1921 will, where Civilian Conservation Corps Company 817 built a stone tower, a pavilion and roads in the 1930s.
• Temple Railroad and Heritage Museum — 19 mi
  The Santa Fe depot of 1911 in a railroad town that began in 1880 as a construction camp, now a museum with locomotives and cars parked beside the active rail yard.
• Dr Pepper Museum — 25 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.
• Armstrong Browning Library — 25 mi
  A three-story Italian Renaissance library on the Baylor campus built to hold A. J. Armstrong's Browning collection, dedicated in December 1951 and now, by its own account, the world's largest of Browning material.

More markers nearby

• Mother Neff State Park — 2.5 mi
• Moody-Leon United Methodist Church — 4.5 mi
• First Baptist Church of Oglesby — 5.2 mi
• First Baptist Church of McGregor — 7.1 mi