First Baptist Church of Beeville

John Milton Sallee, born at Somerset, Kentucky, in 1844, came to Beeville in 1899 and served this church until his death in 1915. He had pastored Kentucky churches for about three decades, and with his wife Rachel Fair raised eight children. Three became Baptist missionaries in China: William Eugene for twenty-seven years, Mamie Sallee Bryan for thirty-two, and Hannah Fair Sallee for thirty-nine. In his years here a Sunday school for Mexican residents began in 1902, and a July 1903 flood destroyed the Mexican church. He is buried in Glenwood Cemetery, Beeville.

What the plaque says

First Baptist Church of Beeville This church was organized in 1869 as the Beeville Baptist Church. Its first sanctuary was built near Poesta Creek in 1871. The congregation grew quickly, emerging as the largest among the 39 members of the regional Blanco Baptist Association by 1876. The congregation changed its name to First Baptist Church of Beeville about 1887. Through the efforts of the Rev. J.M. Sallee and his family, the church began tradition of extensive foreign missionary work about 1900. The congregation built its fourth sanctuary at this site in 1957. (1993)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lake Corpus Christi State Park — 25 mi
  A lake park in the South Texas brush country above Mathis, on a reservoir of the Nueces, with a Civilian Conservation Corps refectory and more than 200 bird species.
• Zaragoza Birthplace State Historic Site — 28 mi
  A rebuilt stone house beside La Bahía marking where Ignacio Seguín Zaragoza, the general of the Battle of Puebla and Cinco de Mayo, was born in 1829.
• Presidio La Bahía — 28 mi
  A Spanish fort on its third site since 1749, held in turn by filibusters, insurgents and Fannin's Fort Defiance, rebuilt in stone in the 1960s around a chapel that never fell.
• Fannin Memorial Monument — 28 mi
  The 1938 pink granite memorial over the common grave of Fannin's men, shot on the roads out of Goliad on Palm Sunday 1836, the grave itself found again only in the 1930s.

More markers nearby

• James Lincoln de la Mothe Borglum — steps away
• First Methodist Church of Beeville — steps away
• First Presbyterian Church of Beeville — steps away
• The Railroad in Bee County — 0.3 mi