First Baptist Church of Ovilla

Ovilla's early-1900s main street, the Handbook of Texas says, included a post office, a bank, a cotton gin, a pharmacy, a blacksmith shop and several dry-goods stores. The post office closed in 1906, and fires in 1918 and 1926 destroyed most of the downtown buildings. Because railroads and major highways passed it by, the town stopped growing for decades, until people moving out from Dallas started it again. The Baptists' tabernacle on Red Oak Creek dates to 1904, in the middle of that commercial moment, and the 1936 sanctuary came a decade after the last fire.

What the plaque says

First Baptist Church of Ovilla Area residents organized a Baptist church in September 1903. The next year, the community built a wooden tabernacle on Red Oak Creek for use by local churches, including the Baptist congregation, which participated in regular services and revivals. In 1922, the Rev. Bob Burleson became the first full-time pastor for the Baptists. Records are unclear about other early meeting spaces, but in 1936 the congregation built a sanctuary at this site, adding other facilities over time. More than 100 years after its initial organization, First Baptist still serves the community through worship, support and outreach. (2005)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Cedar Ridge Preserve — 8.7 mi
  A 633-acre Audubon Dallas preserve at the western edge of Dallas County, with about nine miles of trails through prairie, woodland and escarpment hills.
• Ellis County Courthouse — 10.0 mi
  J. Riely Gordon's courthouse of 1897 in Pecos red sandstone and pink granite, with twenty-one carved stone faces and two cornerstones left by a quarrel over its building.
• Dallas Heritage Village at Old City Park — 18 mi
  Dallas's first city park, laid out around Browder's Spring in 1876, now a museum of historic buildings moved here from across North Texas, among them Millermore, a cotton planter's mansion.
• The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza — 18 mi
  A plow-company warehouse of 1903, identified by the Warren Commission as the building Oswald fired from, now a museum on its sixth and seventh floors above Dealey Plaza.

More markers nearby

• Ovilla — steps away
• Shiloh Cemetery — 0.9 mi
• Parsons' Cavalry C.S.A. — 4.5 mi
• Ellis County — 4.5 mi