First Presbyterian Church

John Henry Zivley, the circuit rider who became the church's first regular pastor, was born in 1824 in Shelbyville, Tennessee, and graduated from Union Theological Seminary in New York in 1847. From 1853 to 1879 he lived in Austin and did home-mission work, organizing and building churches in San Marcos, Seguin, Lockhart and Manor. In the Civil War he served as a chaplain in General Tom Green's Brigade. His sermons, speeches, notebooks and an 1892 autobiographical sketch are kept by the Presbyterian Historical Society. He died in Marlin in 1905.

What the plaque says

First Presbyterian Church In 1848, Presbyterian settlers met in log courthouse to hear sermons by the rev. Nathaniel P. Charlot, teacher of area's first Sunday School. In 1853, circuit rider Humphrey W. Rogers and Mr. Charlot organized this church. The Rev. J. H. Zivley (1824-1905), also a circuit rider, from Austin, became first regular pastor in 1854. Original church building, at Austin (now LBJ) and Colorado, was erected 1872. Second, at present site, was occupied on Sept. 16, 1897. Present structure, built in 1952, was dedicated on the 100th anniversary, in October 1953. (1973)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Spring Lake and the Meadows Center — 1.2 mi
  The headsprings of the San Marcos River, among the longest-inhabited places in North America, once an amusement park with a swimming pig and now seen from glass-bottom boats.
• Gruene Historic District — 14 mi
  A cotton town on the Guadalupe that the boll weevil emptied, rescued in the 1970s by a kayaking architecture student, with a dance hall that says it has never closed.
• Lockhart Courthouse Square — 16 mi
  A cotton-era courthouse town named the Barbecue Capital of Texas, built near the 1840 Plum Creek fight that followed the killing of Comanche leaders at peace talks.
• Sophienburg Museum and Archives — 17 mi
  The hilltop where Prince Carl of Solms-Braunfels raised the Adelsverein's headquarters in 1845, now the museum and archive of the German colony that became New Braunfels.

More markers nearby

• Site of Coronal Institute — steps away
• Founding of the First Methodist Church — 0.3 mi
• The Courthouses of Hays County — 0.3 mi
• Ulysses Cephas — 0.3 mi