First Methodist Church of Lubbock

Lubbock grew into a city of churches. By the 1980s it had some 250, including a Jewish synagogue, and it had known only one saloon, which lasted very briefly soon after the town was founded. The city stayed legally dry until an election on April 9, 1972, allowed liquor by the drink, though not package sales, and ended its distinction as the largest dry city in the country. The Methodist name reached medicine too: the Lubbock Sanitarium of 1917, one of the city's first two hospitals, was the predecessor of Methodist Hospital.

What the plaque says

First Methodist Church of Lubbock This congregation traces its history to 1892, when circuit riding minister R .M. Morris and 12 charter members organized the Lubbock Methodist Church. Early worship services were held in the schoolhouse and the Lubbock County Courthouse. In 1900 the Rev. T. W. Sharp became the city's first resident Methodist pastor. The church's first sanctuary, built in 1904, was destroyed by a 1917 fire. The congregation built larger structures over the years to accommodate its growing membership and programs, which include missionary activities and educational services. (1992)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Buddy Holly Center — 0.6 mi
  The city's museum of Buddy Holly and West Texas music in a 1928 railway depot, with the house where the Crickets worked on That'll Be the Day moved next door.
• American Windmill Museum — 1.6 mi
  Lubbock's park of restored water-pumping windmills and early wind chargers, more than 70 of them turning outdoors and the rare ones under roof, with a megawatt-era turbine overhead.
• National Ranching Heritage Center — 2.0 mi
  A Texas Tech outdoor museum where ranch houses, barns, windmills and a depot from across the ranching country were moved one by one onto a single park beside the campus.
• Lubbock Lake Landmark — 3.4 mi
  A bend of Yellow House Draw on Lubbock's north edge where digging has found nearly 12,000 years of people on the Southern High Plains, layer on layer, from Clovis to the 1880s.

More markers nearby

• Congressman George Mahon — 0.2 mi
• Lubbock County — 0.3 mi
• Colonel T. S. Lubbock and Texas in the Civil War — 0.3 mi
• Mackenzie Scout Trail — 0.4 mi