First Baptist Church of Godley

Godley was a railroad town from the start. The Handbook of Texas dates it to 1886 and names it for R. B. Godley, a Cleburne lumber merchant who gave an eight-acre townsite and twenty acres of right-of-way to the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe. A station was built that year. By 1888, when the post office opened, the town had a gristmill, three cotton gins and two dairy-processing plants, and four years later two general stores. The congregation joined the town in 1899, from a home four miles out.

What the plaque says

First Baptist Church of Godley Originally known as Bethany Baptist Church, this congregation was organized in the spring of 1878 at the home of J. P. Vickers, about four miles from what is now the town of Godley. In 1880, during the pastorate of the Rev. S. E. Brook, the new church was accepted into the Alvarado Baptist Association. Worship services were held the first Sunday and every third Saturday and Sunday of the month. In 1899 the congregation moved into the town of Godley and adopted the name Godley Baptist Church. The fellowship became known as First Baptist Church in 1974. (1994)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Acton State Historic Site — 9.2 mi
  The smallest state historic site in Texas, a grave plot holding Elizabeth Crockett, widow of David Crockett, under a 1913 statue of a pioneer woman shading her eyes toward the west.
• Cleburne State Park — 14 mi
  A 1930s Civilian Conservation Corps park on the old Chisholm Trail crossing country, with a spring-fed lake, a hand-carved three-tiered spillway and a CCC bridge in Johnson County.
• Granbury Courthouse Square — 15 mi
  A National Register square of limestone storefronts around W. C. Dodson's Second Empire courthouse, whose clock tower citizens saved after a 1968 tornado.
• Dinosaur Valley State Park — 22 mi
  Theropod and sauropod trackways of about 113 million years ago in the bed of the Paluxy River, a National Natural Landmark where R. T. Bird found the first distinct sauropod tracks in 1937.

More markers nearby

• Site of Buchanan — 5.3 mi
• Bruce-Davis House — 7.6 mi
• Methodism in Joshua — 8.3 mi
• Acton Methodist Church — 9.4 mi