Enloe United Methodist Church

Enloe is a railroad town that arrived late. J. A. Enloe gave the land in 1897 for a Texas-Midland stop, Jerry P. High opened the post office that year, and the Baptist church moved closer to the tracks. The school building came from nearby Liberty, and the district soon absorbed the Mount Hebron school. Unitia, a mile northeast, where the Methodists had once met, lost its post office in 1903, and its school merged into Enloe's in 1913. By 1970 the town's students attended the Cooper district.

What the plaque says

Enloe United Methodist Church According to Methodist association records, this congregation, led by the Rev. W. P. Reed, first assembled as a full station in the early 1870s in the community that became Unitia. The new church changed locations several times in its early years, moving to a site known as Thomas Chapel in 1873 and then to the nearby community of Liberty in 1881. The congregation returned to Unitia in 1884 but later relocated to the fledgling town of Enloe in 1896. The Texas Midland Railroad arrived in town the following year. Enloe's population grew from 100 to 273 in 1904 and was 400 by 1914. The town boasted two banks, a telegraph office, a restaurant, two general stores, a pharmacy, a seed store, two cotton gins and a bakery. The Clem Lumber Company was headquartered here and cotton shipping was the major industry. The house of worship erected by the Methodists burned on Easter Sunday 1919 and a new structure was erected later that year. The congregation was a vital part of the community. By the 1930s the membership was about 150 people with six Sunday School classes. A parsonage was erected in 1954 and an educational building was added in 1955. The Enloe United Methodist Church continued to meet in the 1919 structure at the close of the 20th century. The church and congregation remain in service with a variety of programs including the Lord's Acre Festival, originated in the 1950s, and other worship and community service activities. (1999)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Cooper Lake State Park — 5.9 mi
  Two units on Jim Chapman Lake, a Corps reservoir proposed in the late 1930s, stalled by a lawsuit until 1984 and dedicated in 1991, with a 10.5-mile equestrian trail and wildlife land around it.
• Evergreen Cemetery — 16 mi
  Paris's town cemetery since 1866, with a carved-stone gallery that includes the Babcock monument in cowboy boots, and the grave of the three-year-old whose death led to the 1893 lynching of Henry Smith.
• Eiffel Tower — 16 mi
  A 65-foot Eiffel Tower with a red cowboy hat, built by the local welders' union in 1993 beside Paris's Love Civic Center.
• Sam Bell Maxey House State Historic Site — 16 mi
  The Italian-villa-style house in Paris, finished in 1868 with a lawyer's fees, where a Confederate major general turned U.S. senator and two later generations of his family lived.

More markers nearby

• Amy Settlement — 1.8 mi
• Leroy Nelson DeWitt, Pioneer Citizen — 3.6 mi
• Thomas Wilson Stegall — 4.2 mi
• Delta County — 4.3 mi