First Methodist Church of Holliday

Holliday already had a stage stop when its Methodists organized. In 1890 the Wichita Valley Railway arrived, a post office opened and George P. Meade platted the town. About twenty-five people lived there in 1892, when a Professor Rinehart began teaching at a district school; the first water well was drilled that May, and land for a cemetery was given in June. By 1896 Holliday had about 100 residents, two more Protestant churches, a two-story hotel, a livery stable and blacksmith shop, general stores, a physician and a justice of the peace.

What the plaque says

Although records of the congregation date to 1892, Methodist circuit-riding ministers were serving this area as early as 1889. R. P. McElwreath was the first pastor of the Holliday church. Ten acres of land were deeded to the church, and the plot was known as the Holliday Campground. The first church building was erected about 1900, largely due to the efforts of church member James Madison Taylor (1836-1921). The wooden frame church was razed in the 1920s, and a new brick structure was built in 1927 during the pastorate of S.M. Dunham. Texas Sesquicentennial 1836-1986.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Kell House Museum — 13 mi
  The 1909 Classic Revival house of Frank Kell, the miller and railroad builder who helped make Wichita Falls a city, shown by guided tour with its family furniture still in place.
• World's Littlest Skyscraper — 14 mi
  A four-story brick tower in downtown Wichita Falls, 40 feet tall and 10 feet wide, the leftover of a 1919 oil-boom office deal in which, the story goes, investors misread inches as feet.
• Royal Theater — 15 mi
  Archer City's movie house, burned in 1965, given a false front for The Last Picture Show and brought back by the town in the 1990s as a working stage on Main Street.
• Lake Arrowhead State Park — 18 mi
  A prairie park on the north shore of the Wichita Falls water-supply lake, which drowned the town of Halsell in 1965-66, with mesquite campsites, a lighted pier and more than 200 bird species.

More markers nearby

• Maggie and Herod "Pap" Simpson — 0.2 mi
• Captain John Holliday — 1.8 mi
• Dad's Corner — 4.6 mi
• Van Dorn Trail — 5.8 mi