First Baptist Church of Blossom

Blossom is older than its Baptist pews. The Handbook of Texas dates the post office to 1849 as Blossom Prairie, and the Texas and Pacific stop of 1876 made it a shipping point for lumber, railroad ties, livestock and grain. By 1884 about a thousand people lived there, served by five steam gristmill-cotton gins, four sawmills, three saloons, three churches and a weekly paper, the Knights of Honor Sentinel. The town incorporated in 1886 and shortened its name to Blossom two years later. When local timber ran short in the 1890s, many mills and workers left.

What the plaque says

First Baptist Church of Blossom Organized in 1873 by the Rev. Sam Anderson. Early services were held in a log schoolhouse, and baptisms conducted in ponds or cotton gin pools. The first permanent sanctuary, built about 1880 on land donated by G. B. Eades, was one large room with a bell tower. The church was a member of the Lamar County Baptist Association. A brick veneer building replaced the old frame church in 1909. The church women paid for the roof by giving pie suppers and selling homemade hominy. The present structure was dedicated in 1967. (1974)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Eiffel Tower — 8.3 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.
• Evergreen Cemetery — 9.9 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.
• Sam Bell Maxey House State Historic Site — 10.0 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.
• Cooper Lake State Park — 27 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.

More markers nearby

• Paris Junior College — 8.6 mi
• Mt. Pleasant Cemetery — 8.7 mi
• St. Joseph's Hospital — 9.6 mi
• First United Methodist Church of Paris — 9.9 mi