First Baptist Church of Moody

The town of Moody took its name from William Lewis Moody, a director of the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railway, according to the Handbook of Texas. Orphaned at fifteen, he studied law at Virginia, moved to Fairfield in 1852, and became a Galveston cotton factor in 1866. He helped found the Galveston Cotton Exchange in 1872 and chaired the Galveston Deep Water Committee. He was a colonel in the Confederate army and a free-silver banker allied with Governor Hogg. His firm built Texas's first dockside cotton compress in 1894.

What the plaque says

First Baptist Church of Moody The First Baptist Church of Moody was organized in 1855 in the commuity of Perry (2 mi. N), with Elder S.G. O'Bryan serving as first pastor. Another early minister, the Rev. John McClain, had been present at the church's organization and served the congregation for many years. In 1883, two years after the Santa Fe Railroad bypassed the town of Perry, the Baptist church moved to this site in the new railroad town of Moody. The church has ordained several pastors from its membership and has contributed much to the heritage of the surrounding area. (1985)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Mother Neff State Park — 6.5 mi
  A Leon River park that grew from six acres Isabella Neff left the state in her 1921 will, where Civilian Conservation Corps Company 817 built a stone tower, a pavilion and roads in the 1930s.
• Temple Railroad and Heritage Museum — 15 mi
  The Santa Fe depot of 1911 in a railroad town that began in 1880 as a construction camp, now a museum with locomotives and cars parked beside the active rail yard.
• Armstrong Browning Library — 21 mi
  A three-story Italian Renaissance library on the Baylor campus built to hold A. J. Armstrong's Browning collection, dedicated in December 1951 and now, by its own account, the world's largest of Browning material.
• Dr Pepper Museum — 22 mi
  The 1906 bottling plant of the Artesian Manufacturing and Bottling Company, built where Dr Pepper outgrew a Waco drugstore soda fountain, now the Dr Pepper Museum.

More markers nearby

• Moody — 0.3 mi
• Old Perry Cemetery — 1.7 mi
• Moody-Leon United Methodist Church — 5.8 mi
• First Baptist Church of Eddy — 6.4 mi