First Methodist Church of Texas City

The northern and southern factions the plaque names trace to 1844, when delegates from slaveholding states withdrew from the Methodist Episcopal General Conference after bitter debate over slavery. The Handbook of Texas says the branches reunited in 1939 as the Methodist Church, a year after Texas City's two congregations had joined. The reunion came with a cost: the new denomination kept a segregated central jurisdiction for its Black members. A 1968 merger with the Evangelical United Brethren called for its end, and by 1970 all Black members in Texas were in geographic conferences.

What the plaque says

First Methodist Church of Texas City This church began with informal Methodist meetings attended by a small group of newly arrived families to Texas City in 1894. The congregation grew and became Texas City's first formally organized church in 1896. The Rev. E. L. Ashmore, a member of the Gulf Mission Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church (North) served as the congregation's first paid pastor. Compelled to seek a secure location after much of Texas City was destroyed in the 1900 storm, the congregation built its first sanctuary at the corner of 3rd Ave. N and 3rd Street by late 1900. A split between the older "northern" and newer "southern" factions of the church led to the formation of the separate Central Methodist Episcopal Church, South, in 1907. Although Central Methodist Church initially struggled, their sanctuary, built at the corner of 4th Street and 6th Ave. N about 1913, eventually housed a congregation larger than that of its parent church. The two congregations joined in 1938, before the denominational reunion, to form the First Methodist Church. In 1940, during the pastorate of the Rev. F. Clyde Woodward, the congregation built a new sanctuary at 5th ave. N and 4th Street. The church was renamed the First United Methodist Church in 1968. (1993)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Texas Seaport Museum and the Elissa — 8.4 mi
  An iron barque launched in Aberdeen in 1877 that called at Galveston twice, ended up smuggling in the Adriatic, and was bought back from a Greek scrapyard to sail again from Pier 22.
• The Strand — 8.5 mi
  Five blocks of iron-front brick buildings near the harbor that were once called the Wall Street of the Southwest, emptied after 1900 and brought back by preservationists from the 1960s.
• Moody Mansion — 8.8 mi
  A four-story, 28,000-square-foot house on Broadway, finished in 1895, that W. L. Moody Jr. bought just after the 1900 storm and his family kept until Hurricane Alicia in 1983.
• 1859 Ashton Villa — 8.9 mi
  A brick Italianate house on Broadway, built with enslaved labor in 1859, whose lawn has held Galveston's Juneteenth commemoration of General Orders, No. 3 every year since 1979.

More markers nearby

• Texas City Dike — 0.5 mi
• First Aero Squadron — 0.5 mi
• The Texas City Disaster — 0.7 mi
• Shoal Point and Half Moon Shoal Lighthouse — 0.8 mi