First United Methodist Church of Columbus

The plaque begins with the lots; the congregation's first years were rougher. In February 1843 two circuit riders, Henderson D. Palmer and John Wesley DeVilbiss, built a raft at Leander Beeson's to cross the flooded Colorado for a Sunday sermon, then gave it up when a man drowned that morning; they made his coffin instead. Robert Guthrie became the first Methodist minister assigned to Columbus in 1845. In March 1847 the congregation counted 27 members, one of them enslaved. The river-facing church stood by summer 1850, and local wags called it the Yell Chapel after pastor Mordecai Yell.

What the plaque says

First United Methodist Church of Columbus One of the earliest Protestant congregations in Texas; founded in Austin's original colony. The first church building was near the Colorado, on a lot " sold" for $1.00 by Isam Tooke in 1848, and an adjoining lot bought in 1849 from George W. Smith. The Rev. J. E. Kolbe was then pastor; trustees were Eli Clapp, W. B. DeWees, Thomas Neavitt, Henry Terrell, I. Tooke, and Asa Townsend. In 1873, a second church was built just south of the railroad. Present site was given by Mrs. Sarah E. Stafford, and a new church was completed in July 1897, under the Rev. S. F. Chambers, pastor. (1974)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Stafford Opera House — steps away
  A cattleman's bank and theater of 1886 on the Columbus square, in a river town Sam Houston burned in 1836 and a county marked by a long feud and a 1935 lynching.
• Attwater Prairie Chicken National Wildlife Refuge — 16 mi
  Ten thousand acres of native coastal prairie northeast of Eagle Lake, kept for a critically endangered grouse, many of whose birds are hatched in captivity and released here.
• Saints Cyril and Methodius Catholic Church (Dubina) — 18 mi
  The church of Texas's first Czech settlement, under a sky-blue painted ceiling that was whitewashed in the 1950s and brought back from faint traces by its own parishioners.
• St. John the Baptist Catholic Church (Ammannsville) — 20 mi
  A wooden Carpenter Gothic church built in 1919 after storm and fire took two before it, its dusty-rose interior painted by an artist whose name was lost for decades.

More markers nearby

• Caledonia Lodge No. 68, A. F. & A. M. — steps away
• The Colorado County Citizen — steps away
• Asa Townsend — steps away
• The Rangers of Austin's Colony — steps away