First Baptist Church of Arlington

The church's first home, Johnson Station, was a frontier outpost and stagecoach stop founded by Middleton Tate Johnson in 1846. When the Texas and Pacific Railway chose a route north of it, the stores and many settlers moved a few miles to the new site. A Presbyterian minister, Andrew S. Hayter, was asked by the railway company to survey the land and is credited with Arlington's first plat. The post office could not use the name Johnson because of Johnson Station, so it opened as Hayter in 1875 and became Arlington, after Robert E. Lee's Virginia home, in 1877.

What the plaque says

First Baptist Church of Arlington In the 1870s this church was organized at Johnson Station, an early Tarrant County settlement and stagecoach stop. In 1876 the Texas and Pacific Railroad built a line through the area and founded Arlington. The church and other institutions moved to the new town. Worship services were held at several meeting sites before the congregation built a sanctuary at Pecan and Abram Streets in 1917. That Church building burned in 1944, and an auditorium was constructed on South Center Street in 1947. A new sanctuary at this location was added in 1959. (1982)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Cedar Ridge Preserve — 11 mi
  A 633-acre Audubon Dallas preserve at the western edge of Dallas County, with about nine miles of trails through prairie, woodland and escarpment hills.
• Tarrant County Courthouse — 13 mi
  A pink-granite courthouse of 1895 on the bluff where the Army set up Fort Worth in 1849, in a county named for the man who led the 1841 attack on the Native villages of Village Creek.
• Fort Worth Stockyards — 14 mi
  The brick-street cattle market where Armour and Swift built packing plants in 1902, now a National Register district with a Coliseum, a museum and a longhorn drive twice a day.
• Kimbell Art Museum — 15 mi
  Louis Kahn's cycloid-vaulted museum of 1972, built from Kay Kimbell's bequest and joined in 2013 by Renzo Piano's pavilion for the exhibitions the Kahn galleries could not hold.

More markers nearby

• North Side School — 0.3 mi
• P.A. Watson Log House — 0.3 mi
• Jopling-Melear Log Cabin — 0.3 mi
• First United Methodist Church of Arlington — 0.4 mi