First Baptist Church of Richardson

The congregation moved because the railroad did. The Handbook of Texas says a settlement called Breckinridge, with a post office, store, blacksmith shop and inn, grew on John B. Floyd's land from 1858. When the Houston and Texas Central laid its line in 1873 it passed Breckinridge by for a new town named for railroad secretary Alfred Richardson. Two landowners sold the townsite for small sums, and a deed error made the first maps show 121 acres instead of 101. The railroad bought the site, the first lot sold soon after, and a post office opened in 1874.

What the plaque says

First Baptist Church of Richardson Founded in 1865 with nineteen charter members, this congregation began as Mt. Calvary Baptist Church. Early worship services were held in the Elm Grove Schoolhouse. The Rev. J. J. Butler was called as first pastor of the congregation. William Huffhines, a charter member of the church and an early Dallas County pioneer, donated two acres of land for a sanctuary. Also located on the land was Mt. Calvary Cemetery. A frame sanctuary was built in 1868 and the congregation continued to meet there until 1885, when they voted to move five miles north to the new town of Richardson. Philemon W. and Mary Huffhines gave land at the corner of Greenville Avenue and Phillips Street for a sanctuary, which was completed in February 1886. After it was destroyed in a storm in 1909, a new brick structure was completed on the same site in 1910. The brick building was replaced in 1953, and one year later the congregation voted to change its name to First Baptist Church of Richardson. Over the years, First Baptist Church has served the community with a varietyof outreach programs. This site was acquired in 1976, and a new sanctuary was dedicated in February 1987. (1989)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fair Park — 13 mi
  The State Fair of Texas grounds since 1886, where the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition left one of the country's greatest concentrations of Art Deco exposition buildings.
• Dallas Museum of Art — 13 mi
  A city art museum that began as the Dallas Art Association in 1903, grew up in Fair Park, and has stood in the Arts District since 1984 under a forty-foot barrel vault.
• African American Museum, Dallas — 13 mi
  Founded in 1974 at Bishop College, a free Fair Park museum holding the Sepia photograph archive, African art and A. Maceo Smith's papers, and the story of the Hall of Negro Life.
• Dallas Heritage Village at Old City Park — 13 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.

More markers nearby

• Richardson — 0.3 mi
• First United Methodist Church Richardson — 0.5 mi
• Blewett Cemetery — 0.5 mi
• First Presbyterian Church of Richardson — 0.8 mi