First Methodist Church of Garland

Before there was a Methodist building, there was a schoolhouse. A Garland historical society account says Abner Keen built a one-room log school beside a spring on Duck Creek in the late 1840s, and an 1849 Methodist church district record identifies it. The Keens were Methodists and several were preachers. The room had split-log puncheon floors and benches, a fieldstone fireplace and no nails. Revivals ran there, with a puncheon mourners' bench down the middle where worshippers knelt. A frame school replaced the log one in 1852 and also served Baptist and Methodist congregations.

What the plaque says

First Methodist Church of Garland Organized in 1855 by 18 charter members, this congregation was served by circuit-riding ministers who conducted worship services in a log cabin schoolhouse located on Duck Creek. A sanctuary built in 1871 was destroyed by a tornado in 1874. The City of Garland was formed in 1887 when the surrounding communities merged. The Methodist Church has been part of Garland's history since its begining. Several buildings have served the congregation, which continues active ministries to its members and community outreach and foreign missionary programs. Gift from Charles and Winifred Stokes (1994)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Rockwall County Historical Foundation & Museum — 11 mi
  A small museum in Harry Myers Park that keeps the evidence on Rockwall's rock wall, sandstone dikes that geologists call natural and folk tales call built.
• Fair Park — 11 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.
• African American Museum, Dallas — 12 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 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.

More markers nearby

• First Christian Church of Garland — steps away
• First Presbyterian Church of Garland — steps away
• Garland — 0.2 mi
• Garland Lodge No. 441, A.F. & A.M. — 0.7 mi