First Baptist Church

Lincoln Guy Conner, the charter member listed first on the plaque, was Canyon's founder. He surveyed and settled the site in December 1887 and laid out the town in the spring of 1889, using his dugout as home, general store and post office. He opened the town's first real estate office and built the Victoria Hotel. When the railroad came, acres of cattle pens went up on land he donated, and in 1910 West Texas State Normal College opened on a forty-acre site he gave. Mary E. Hudspeth, the college's first dean of women, was a member here.

What the plaque says

First Baptist Church Organized Dec. 21, 1890, with seven charter members: Mr. and Mrs. L. G. Conner, a Mr. and Mrs. Ingram, Mr. and Mrs. L. J. Pirtle, Mrs. F. M. Pope. First pastor was The Rev. Whatley. Congregation built Canyon's first church edifice, 1899. Present structure, begun in 1929, was finished after national Depression of the 1930s. First Baptist Church organized and built Latin-American mission; initiated Bible Chair at West Texas State University; erected activity building, High Plains Assembly Grounds. Many W.T.S.U. faculty members have been active leaders in this church. (1970)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum — 0.5 mi
  The Panhandle's great collection, some two million objects behind a 1933 Art Deco hall carved with cattle brands, closed to the public since March 2025 over fire-safety violations.
• Buffalo Lake National Wildlife Refuge — 11 mi
  A 1938 Depression-era lake on Tierra Blanca Creek that has gone dry, now 7,664 acres of shortgrass, cottonwood canyon and a prairie dog town on the High Plains south of Umbarger.
• Palo Duro Canyon State Park — 13 mi
  The upper end of the canyon the state bought in 1933, where CCC crews built the road to the floor and the army burned the winter camps of the Comanche, Kiowa and Cheyenne in 1874.
• TEXAS Outdoor Musical — 13 mi
  A summer pageant of Panhandle settler life staged since 1966 in the Pioneer Amphitheater, built into a basin of Palo Duro Canyon below a 600-foot cliff.

More markers nearby

• First Methodist Church of Canyon — steps away
• Canyon Fire Department — steps away
• Site of Wagon Yard — steps away
• Mary E. Hudspeth House — steps away