First United Methodist Church of Cisco

Cisco played a minor part in the county's oil boom, the Handbook of Texas says, yet its population surged, by some estimates to 15,000, and afterward the town adopted a city charter and built a $25,000 railroad station. Two days before Christmas in 1927 came its best-known event, the Santa Claus Bank Robbery. Four men took $12,000 in cash and $150,000 in securities from the First National Bank; a gun battle left three people dead, and two young girls were taken hostage. In 1980 a professor came to supervise restoring the Mobley Hotel, Conrad Hilton's first hotel.

What the plaque says

The Rev. Lamb Trimble, a Methodist circuit rider, organized this church at Red Gap (two miles west) in 1880. The four charter members met in the home of M.V. Mitchell, a sheep rancher. The congregation moved to Cisco one year later when the city was founded. Services were held in the schoolhouse until 1883 when the members built a sanctuary on this site. A company purchasing right of way property for the railroad donated the land. An 1889 building program, completed during the pastorate of the Rev. T.C. Ragsdale, doubled the size of the structure and added a parsonage. Both buildings were destroyed in 1893 when a tornado struck Cisco killing 23 people and injuring 93 others. Members formed a rebuilding committee and a larger sanctuary and parsonage were constructed, complete with electric lighting. The population growth of Cisco during the Eastland County oil boom made the sanctuary obsolete, and in 1919 work began on a new church building. The Rev. Lewis N. Stuckey conducted the first services when the edifice was dedicated late in 1920. On two separate occasions Cisco headed a district for the Central Texas Methodist Conference until consolidation with Brownwood in 1974. (1980)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Conrad Hilton Center and Mobley Hotel — 0.4 mi
  The 40-room oil-boom hotel in Cisco that Conrad Hilton bought in 1919 when a bank deal fell through, now a museum of the Hilton start and of Cisco's 1927 Santa Claus bank robbery.
• Old Rip at the Eastland County Courthouse — 9.6 mi
  A horned lizard in a glass-topped casket in the 1928 Eastland courthouse, the creature said to have come out alive from the old building's cornerstone after thirty-one years.
• Old Jail Art Center — 30 mi
  An art museum in Albany's 1878 stone jail, where the masons carved their initials to be sure of pay, now holding Chinese tomb figures and works by Picasso and Klee.

More markers nearby

• First Presbyterian Church of Cisco — steps away
• First Baptist Church of Cisco — steps away
• Cisco College — 1.0 mi
• Mangum Baptist Church — 8.6 mi