First United Methodist Church

The church began as Kingsborough's Methodists, and the town around it grew through quarrels and rail. The Handbook of Texas says Kingsboro became the county seat in 1852 and took the county's name, and that Kaufman's voters, protesting Reconstruction, refused to hold elections through the 1870s even after incorporating in 1872. The Texas Trunk line arrived in 1881 and the Texas Central connected the town with Dallas two years later. By 1884 Kaufman had four churches, two schools, an opera house and forty businesses, and a tornado in 1963 badly damaged the business area.

What the plaque says

First United Methodist Church Organized in February of 1845 as the Kingsborough Methodist Episcopal Church, South. The Rev. Wm. K. Wilson was first pastor. In 1850 Kingsborough (county seat) was renamed Kaufman. Present site was purchased and first building erected 1857, with The Rev. J. A. Scruggs as pastor. The second building, a traditional steepled, white frame structure, was built 1876 at cost of $400, with The Rev. O. P. Thomas as pastor. Present brick building was erected 1909 at a cost of $13,000. The Rev. A. R. Nash was pastor. It was redecorated 1968, with The Rev. E. H. Cole, pastor. (1969)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• No. 1 British Flying Training School Museum — 9.3 mi
  A free museum at Terrell's airport where about 2,200 RAF cadets learned to fly between 1941 and 1945, with logbooks, uniforms, letters and original training aircraft.
• Rockwall County Historical Foundation & Museum — 25 mi
  A small museum in Harry Myers Park that keeps the evidence on Rockwall's rock wall, sandstone dikes that geologists call natural and folk tales call built.
• Fair Park — 29 mi
  The State Fair of Texas grounds since 1886, where the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition left one of the country's greatest concentrations of Art Deco exposition buildings.
• African American Museum, Dallas — 29 mi
  Founded in 1974 at Bishop College, a free Fair Park museum holding the Sepia photograph archive, African art and A. Maceo Smith's papers, and the story of the Hall of Negro Life.

More markers nearby

• Mrs. William P. King — steps away
• Colonel Isham Chisum — steps away
• Kaufman County — 0.2 mi
• Birthplace of City of Kaufman; Site of King's Fort — 0.4 mi