First Presbyterian Church of Baird

The young town these Presbyterians joined was not easily set back. In 1884 a fire broke out in S. L. Robinson's store, where Golden's Opera Company was preparing a show for the town, and in 1895 a tornado struck; the Handbook of Texas says neither stopped Baird's progress. W. E. Gilliland began the weekly Baird Star in 1887. Around 1910 a runaway train in the night caused a three-locomotive pileup at the depot. Baird counted 1,502 people in 1904 and peaked at 3,000 in 1929, and its industries came to include gins, an oil refinery and flour mills.

What the plaque says

Organized June 26, 1885, by six members of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, under the Rev. F. E. Leach. Town of Baird was then five years old. In 1906, the Cumberland and "northern" branches of the church were united. The present building was erected in 1910. (1969)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Frontier Texas! — 20 mi
  Abilene's multimedia museum of the frontier as the settlers told it, beside the Texas and Pacific tracks the town was built on, and the official visitor center for the Texas Forts Trail.
• Old Jail Art Center — 23 mi
  An art museum in Albany's 1878 stone jail, where the masons carved their initials to be sure of pay, now holding Chinese tomb figures and works by Picasso and Klee.
• Fort Phantom Hill — 24 mi
  A field of lone stone chimneys north of Abilene, left by the fire after the Army left in 1854, later a stage stop and a buffalo-hide town of more than 500 people.
• Conrad Hilton Center and Mobley Hotel — 24 mi
  The 40-room oil-boom hotel in Cisco that Conrad Hilton bought in 1919 when a bank deal fell through, now a museum of the Hilton start and of Cisco's 1927 Santa Claus bank robbery.

More markers nearby

• Callahan County — steps away
• Camp Pecan, C.S.A. — steps away
• First Baptist Church of Baird — 0.2 mi
• Captain Andrew Jackson Berry — 1.1 mi