First Methodist Church of Canyon

For years Canyon's congregations shared one building. A temporary two-room frame courthouse, put up when the county organized in 1889, served for church services and other community gatherings, and that fall Emma Turner taught the county's first school in the old wooden shack that had served as a courthouse. A brick courthouse replaced the frame building in 1909. During the 1920s the town's Methodist, Baptist and Presbyterian congregations each built new brick churches, as Canyon paved its streets and piped in natural gas.

What the plaque says

First Methodist Church of Canyon Earliest religious service in Canyon was in 1889. Leaders were the Rev. Jerome Harelson and Isaac Mills, of Panhandle District, Methodist Church, the Rev. B. F. Jackson organized this (city's first) church in Oct. 1889. Members: Mrs. Crain, Mrs. M. M. McGee, Mrs. A. Roper, Miss Louie Roper, Mr. and Mrs. Nix Thompson and Miss Tennie Thompson. The Rev. Mr. Jackson preached to great throngs in Palo Duro Canyon, 1890; held first local funeral and first wedding, 1891. Original church building was erected under the first regular pastor, the Rev. T. F. Robeson, 1900. (1969)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum — 0.4 mi
  The Panhandle's great collection, some two million objects behind a 1933 Art Deco hall carved with cattle brands, closed to the public since March 2025 over fire-safety violations.
• Buffalo Lake National Wildlife Refuge — 11 mi
  A 1938 Depression-era lake on Tierra Blanca Creek that has gone dry, now 7,664 acres of shortgrass, cottonwood canyon and a prairie dog town on the High Plains south of Umbarger.
• Palo Duro Canyon State Park — 13 mi
  The upper end of the canyon the state bought in 1933, where CCC crews built the road to the floor and the army burned the winter camps of the Comanche, Kiowa and Cheyenne in 1874.
• TEXAS Outdoor Musical — 13 mi
  A summer pageant of Panhandle settler life staged since 1966 in the Pioneer Amphitheater, built into a basin of Palo Duro Canyon below a 600-foot cliff.

More markers nearby

• First Baptist Church — steps away
• Mary E. Hudspeth House — steps away
• Site of Wagon Yard — steps away
• Canyon Fire Department — steps away