First Baptist Church of League City

The congregation first met in the Clear Creek schoolhouse, in a community that did not yet carry League's name. Galveston businessman J. C. League bought land in the early 1890s and changed the town's name from Clear Creek to League City. The Handbook of Texas says the first business was a brickyard in 1858, that an 1887 poor and convict farm housed elderly residents in cottages tended by convicts, and that Japanese farmers began growing rice in 1903. Magnolia Cemetery, a burial ground for African Americans, was established in 1896.

What the plaque says

First Baptist Church of League City First Baptist church on Galveston County mainland; organized in Clear Creek Schoolhouse, Dec. 4, 1887. B. A. Smalley served as clerk. First permanent pastor was the Rev. D. T. McLeod, Oct. 1895. First building erected on this site was dedicated June 14, 1896. (1973)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Space Center Houston — 2.7 mi
  The visitor center of NASA's Johnson Space Center at Clear Lake, with flown capsules, a shuttle replica riding a 747, and tram tours to Mission Control and a Saturn V.
• San Jacinto Battleground State Historic Site — 16 mi
  The 1,200 acres of coastal prairie and marsh where the Texas Revolution ended in eighteen minutes, and the 567-foot shaft of fossil-studded limestone that has stood over them since 1939.
• Emancipation Park — 23 mi
  The Third Ward park that freedpeople bought for Juneteenth in 1872, rebuilt in 2017 on Emancipation Avenue and still the center of the city's June 19 celebration.
• Galveston Island State Park — 23 mi
  A cattle ranch willed to the state that now runs the full width of Galveston Island, from two miles of Gulf beach across dunes and prairie to the marshes of West Galveston Bay.

More markers nearby

• St. Mary Mission Church — steps away
• League Park — steps away
• Contributions to the Texas Rice Industry by Seito and Kiyoaki Saibara — 2.5 mi
• Webster Presbyterian Church — 4.0 mi