First Presbyterian Church of San Antonio

Daniel Baker, who reorganized the congregation in 1851, came from pulpits far from the frontier. Born at Midway, Georgia, in 1791 and raised by an older brother and an aunt, he graduated from Princeton in 1815, and in the early 1820s he led the Second Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C., where John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson were members. Back in Texas in 1848, he preached from Victoria to San Antonio, and after a brush with danger on the road to Austin a rumor that he had been murdered spread as far as Washington.

What the plaque says

First Presbyterian Church of San Antonio In 1844 a Presbyterian, the Rev. John McCullough, and a Methodist, the Rev. John Wesley DeVilbiss, visited San Antonio and conducted the first Protestant worship service. The Board of Foreign Missions in 1846 sent the Rev. McCullough to San Antonio to organize this church. After two years the membership erected an adobe building on Commerce Street. It served as the first Protestant church house in the city. The fellowship declined in 1849, and in 1851 the Rev. Dr. Daniel Baker, founder of the Presbyterian Church in the Republic of Texas, and six members reorganized the congregation. The contract for a new church house was let in 1859, for construction on the northeast corner of Flores and Houston streets. With the beginning of the Civil War, the fellowship broke with the Presbyterian Church (USA) and building construction was halted. A storm in 1868 destroyed the adobe church building. The second house of worship was finally completed in 1879 under the leadership of the Rev. Dr. J. W. Neil. The Rev. Dr. Arthur Gray Jones led in the erection in 1910 of this Gothic Revival structure, designed by Atlee B. Ayres. In the 1920s, during the pastorate of the Rev. Dr. P.B. Hill, radio broadcasts of services began and the attached education building was completed. (1979)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• The Alamo — 0.3 mi
  Mission San Antonio de Valero before it was a fort: a church its builders never finished, a thirteen-day siege in 1836, and the Army gable of 1850-52 that became its emblem.
• San Antonio River Walk — 0.5 mi
  A Depression-era park one level below downtown, built because San Antonio refused to pave its river after the 1921 flood, and designed by an architect the project later fired.
• La Villita Historic Arts Village — 0.5 mi
  The little village across the river from the presidio, where Cos surrendered San Antonio in 1835, rebuilt by Depression-era youth crews as a working crafts village.
• San Fernando Cathedral — 0.7 mi
  The Canary Islanders' parish church on Main Plaza, where Bowie married and Santa Anna raised a red flag, rebuilt in Gothic Revival around the walls of the 1750s church.

More markers nearby

• In Re Ricardo Rodriguez — steps away
• Site of Home (1850 to 1870) of Samuel Augustus Maverick — 0.2 mi
• Adina de Zavala — 0.2 mi
• Alamo Cenotaph — 0.2 mi