First Presbyterian Church

The settlers whose home churches paid for this building came as the old ranch range was sold, and from 1903 the man selling it was Timothy Dwight Hobart. A Vermont school superintendent who came to Texas in 1882 for the New York and Texas Land Company, Hobart went to work for the White Deer Lands Trust in 1903 and from his Gray County headquarters surveyed, fenced, improved and sold its lands until 1924. He then managed the JA Ranch, helped found Pampa and became its mayor in 1927, and raised money for the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum.

What the plaque says

First Presbyterian Church First church building in White Deer. Dedicated July 4, 1909. Financed mainly through gifts from pioneer members' home churches; and donations by other denominations. Also used by Methodists and Baptists for 11 years, with circuit pastors for the three congregations rotating their Sunday visits. A Union Sunday School and missionary society were organized. All offerings were equally shared among the three churches. The First Presbyterian Church building served as a worship center from 1909 to 1969. The structure was moved from this site in 1978. (1979)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Carson County Square House Museum — 13 mi
  The 1880s ranch cottage that is the oldest house in the town of Panhandle, at the heart of a twenty-one-building museum of the plains from mammoth hunters to the oil boom.
• Woody Guthrie Folk Music Center — 14 mi
  The old Harris Drug Store in Pampa, where a young Woody Guthrie jerked sodas and found his first guitar, now a folk music center with Friday night jam sessions.
• White Deer Land Museum — 14 mi
  The 1916 Pampa office of the land company that sold a foreclosed British ranch to wheat farmers, with an annex holding one of the Panhandle's largest Red River War collections.
• Hutchinson County Museum — 21 mi
  Borger's museum on the three-mile Main Street of a 1926 oil boom town that drew 45,000 people in ninety days and was put under martial law in 1929.

More markers nearby

• White Deer — 0.2 mi
• Jackson General Store — 0.3 mi
• White Deer United Methodist Church — 0.3 mi
• Polish Settlers of White Deer — 0.6 mi