Historical Marker

First Presbyterian Church of Itasca

Itasca, Hill County · Texas

Erected 1986

Itasca borrowed its name from the headwaters of the Mississippi. The Handbook of Texas says G. M. Dodge bought 100 acres for the Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railroad in 1881 and lots went on sale October 10. In 1900 local investors, many of them Files family members, organized the Itasca Cotton Manufacturing Company, which started spinning on September 7, 1901, with 6,000 spindles and 200 looms. It built a mill village with free water, sewerage and, later, electricity, and made army duck in both world wars. The plant shut in 1959 and the company dissolved in 1967.

What the plaque says

First Presbyterian Church of Itasca This congregation traces its history through six 19th-century churches in five different communities, including Itasca, Osceola, Eureka, Grandview, and Files Valley. The First Cumberland Presbyterian and First Presbyterian (U.S.) churches in Itasca merged in 1912, and the other congregations joined with it over the years. Since its merger with the Files Valley Presbyterian Church in 1958, this fellowship has been associated with the Presbyterian Children's Home, a statewide orphanage begun in 1906. Texas Sesquicentennial 1836-1986

Where it stands

32.16092, -97.14928 · Directions

Worth the stop nearby

Hill County Courthouse — 10 mi
Wesley C. Dodson's limestone Second Empire courthouse of 1890 on the Hillsboro square, gutted by fire on New Year's Day 1993 and rededicated in 1999 after a rebuilding that two Willie Nelson concerts helped pay for.
Ellis County Courthouse — 23 mi
J. Riely Gordon's courthouse of 1897 in Pecos red sandstone and pink granite, with twenty-one carved stone faces and two cornerstones left by a quarrel over its building.
Cleburne State Park — 24 mi
A 1930s Civilian Conservation Corps park on the old Chisholm Trail crossing country, with a spring-fed lake, a hand-carved three-tiered spillway and a CCC bridge in Johnson County.

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