First Anglican Church Service in the Callahan Area

Alexander Charles Garrett reached this hillside with a long apprenticeship behind him. He took his degrees at Trinity College, Dublin, and in British Columbia served as pastor, doctor, lawyer and teacher among both settlers and Native people. Consecrated at Omaha on December 20, 1874, he arrived in Dallas on New Year's Eve to find five coworkers and twelve stations. In 1889 he founded St. Mary's College. The Handbook of Texas says he never missed an appointment, and that even after going blind he addressed anniversary gatherings until he was ninety.

What the plaque says

Alexander Charles Garrett (1832-1924), a native of Ireland, came to Canada as an Anglican Missionary. Later he moved to San Francisco, and then to Omaha, Nebraska. In 1874 he was sent to Dallas as bishop of the Northern Missionary District of Texas. Here he served an area of 100,000 square miles, traveling mostly on horseback or in horse-drawn vehicles. Captain John Trent, born 1839 in South Carolina, moved to Texas from Tennessee in 1875 with wife, children, and other relatives. The family built a log house here at Tecumseh Peak and raised sheep and cattle. Going to market in Dallas, Captain Trent met Bishop Garrett, who offered to visit him at his ranch. In a first effort the Bishop lost his way, but the next year found the homestead. Neighbors thronged in, and on February 23, 1878, an Anglican service was held "for the first time in these wild mountains." Later Bishop Garrett was presiding bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States. On the centennial of his birth (1932), churchmen, led by the Rev. Willis Gerhart of Abilene, joined with Masonic bodies of Dallas and this area in erecting the cross at this site to mark his visit of 1878. (1976)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Buffalo Gap Historic Village — 13 mi
  The 1880 stone courthouse and jail of the county seat Abilene took away, with about twenty old buildings from around West Texas gathered around it since 1956.
• Frontier Texas! — 16 mi
  Abilene's multimedia museum of the frontier as the settlers told it, beside the Texas and Pacific tracks the town was built on, and the official visitor center for the Texas Forts Trail.
• Abilene State Park — 17 mi
  A pecan-shaded park on Elm Creek in the Callahan Divide south of Abilene, with red sandstone CCC buildings, a summer pool, a bird blind and yurts under the trees.
• Z. I. Hale Museum and Rock Hotel — 28 mi
  A free museum in a Winters optometrist's office, a 1909 railroad hotel and a 1927 implement dealership, with Rogers Hornsby's hometown memorabilia and a 1912 horse-drawn cotton picker.

More markers nearby

• J. D. Windham — 3.3 mi
• Taylor County — 9.4 mi
• Lindbergh in West Texas — 13 mi
• Town of Buffalo Gap — 13 mi