First Baptist Church of Wharton

Wharton Baptists organized in 1847, and the Handbook of Texas records a tradition about who the founders were: twenty-four White members and ninety-eight enslaved people. Enslaved Baptists outnumbered White ones on the first roll by four to one, which says what the county's plantation society looked like from inside a church. Tradition credits Rev. Noah Hill with helping organize it, and the plaque for Albert Clinton Horton, one of the county's largest slaveholders in 1860, says he helped found the church.

What the plaque says

First Baptist Church of Wharton Early Baptist worship services in this area were most likely held at the home of "Old 300" colonist William Kincheloe, perhaps as early as 1822. A Sunday School was started in or near present-day Wharton in 1829 or 1830. Baptist congregation was organized by 1847. That year, the Colorado Church of Wharton, or Wharton Baptist Church as it came to be called, became one of the founding members of the Colorado association. The congregation's first sanctuary was built in the late 1850s. The fellowship has been known since 1913 as the First Baptist Church of Wharton. (Texas Sesquicentennial 1836-1986.)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Attwater Prairie Chicken National Wildlife Refuge — 26 mi
  Ten thousand acres of native coastal prairie northeast of Eagle Lake, kept for a critically endangered grouse, many of whose birds are hatched in captivity and released here.
• Varner-Hogg Plantation State Historic Site — 30 mi
  A Brazos sugar plantation built by enslaved people for the Patton family, later leased convict labor and Hogg family oil, now told through Rachel Patton and Sarah Ford.
• Levi Jordan Plantation State Historic Site — 35 mi
  A sugar and cotton plantation on the San Bernard River whose enslaved builders and their descendants left one of the best-preserved African American archeological sites in Texas.

More markers nearby

• Judge George E. Quinan — 0.3 mi
• Wharton County — 0.4 mi
• St. Paul Lutheran Church — 0.4 mi
• City of Wharton — 0.4 mi