First Methodist Church of Pampa

The congregation's 1928 sanctuary went up while Pampa changed almost overnight. The town had about 987 people in 1926; by 1931 it counted 10,470 residents and 430 businesses. It had voted to incorporate on February 17, 1912, with a commission-manager government, and J. M. Smith had started the Pampa Daily News. Even so, the Handbook of Texas says, Pampa saw little of the vice, crime and corruption of other boomtowns. In 1932 the Fort Worth and Denver and the Clinton and Oklahoma Western extended their lines to town, giving it rail service in new directions.

What the plaque says

First Methodist Church of Pampa Five charter members established the First Methodist Church in 1906, the first denomination organized in Pampa. In 1908 a one-room white church with a steeple was built. This church site was purchased in 1924, and a new sanctuary was completed in 1928. Additional buildings and land were acquired as the congregation grew and renovations to the structures were made. The church provides many educational and worship activities for its members and supports the community with several outreach programs. The First Methodist Church has served the area for more than 90 years. (1996)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• White Deer Land Museum — steps away
  The 1916 Pampa office of the land company that sold a foreclosed British ranch to wheat farmers, with an annex holding one of the Panhandle's largest Red River War collections.
• Woody Guthrie Folk Music Center — 0.2 mi
  The old Harris Drug Store in Pampa, where a young Woody Guthrie jerked sodas and found his first guitar, now a folk music center with Friday night jam sessions.
• Roberts County Museum — 21 mi
  The county museum in Miami's old Santa Fe depot, holding mammoth bones and Clovis points from a 1934 dig, in the cow town that has held a cow-calling contest since 1949.
• Hutchinson County Museum — 26 mi
  Borger's museum on the three-mile Main Street of a 1926 oil boom town that drew 45,000 people in ninety days and was put under martial law in 1929.

More markers nearby

• Vittorio Emanuel von Brunow, M. D. — steps away
• Pampa — steps away
• Gray County 50th Year Anniversary — steps away
• Peter W. Gray — 0.2 mi