First Christian Church of Palmer

Palmer's brickworks and newspapers show the town beyond its pews. The Handbook of Texas says the Palmer Press Brick Company, later the Barron Brick Company, built a plant in 1902. The Palmer Rustler, one of two weeklies founded in 1891, later merged with Ennis's Weekly Local to form the Ellis County News, and the Palmer Times was running by 1896. On the eve of World War I the town had 750 residents, four churches, two banks and more than forty other businesses. The Handbook also notes its population slipped to 601 by the mid-1970s.

What the plaque says

First Christian Church of Palmer In 1853 disciples in the area around Rockett and Brushy Creek (8 miles northwest) established a church called "Liberty-Sylvania". Members of the congregation were instrumental in the formation of new churches in Corinth, Ferris, Palmer and Waxahachie. Two members of the church at Rockett, Robert "Uncle Bob" Smith and his wife Lavisa, moved their family to Palmer in 1868. With their help the First Christian Church of Palmer was organized that same year. A one-room schoolhouse served as the first meeting place. An agreement, signed in 1880 by representatives of the Baptist, Christian, and Cumberland Presbyterian churches of the town, called for the construction of a community church building. Completed later that year on Dallas Street, the Palmer Union Church sanctuary was used by all three congregations. Each church was assigned a specific Sunday of every month for their services. Members of the First Christian Church constructed their own sanctuary at the intersection of Dallas and Jefferson Streets in 1898. The congregation moved to this site in 1940 when the present brick edifice was completed. The church bell, still in use, is from the Palmer Union Church building. (1980)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Ellis County Courthouse — 11 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.
• Cedar Ridge Preserve — 22 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.
• African American Museum, Dallas — 24 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 — 25 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

• First Baptist Church of Palmer — 0.3 mi
• Bristol School — 6.1 mi
• Old Lake Dam — 6.7 mi
• City of Ferris — 6.9 mi