First United Methodist Church of Midlothian

The name Midlothian arrived with the Santa Fe. The Handbook of Texas says the settlement began as Hawkins' Springs, then got a post office called Barker in 1877, probably for Charles Barker. In 1882 or 1883 it became Midlothian, a name most accounts credit to a Scottish train engineer thinking of home. The Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe reached the town in 1883, and by 1884 there were two churches, a district school and a newspaper, the Midlothian News. The town incorporated in April 1888 and, by 1892, held between 600 and 800 people.

What the plaque says

First United Methodist Church of Midlothian Methodist worship services in this area date to the late 1840s, meeting in homes, the people were served by circuit riding ministers from Waxahachie. A schoolhouse built for the pioneer community of Hawkins was also used as a church. Beginning in 1861 a church built in Lebanon, another pioneer settlement, served the Methodists of the area. The congregation moved to Midlothian in 1883, and a church building was completed in 1902. A new house of worship was erected in 1966. Members of the church include many descendants of its pioneer founders. (1988)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Ellis County Courthouse — 10 mi
  J. Riely Gordon's courthouse of 1897 in Pecos red sandstone and pink granite, with twenty-one carved stone faces and two cornerstones left by a quarrel over its building.
• Cedar Ridge Preserve — 11 mi
  A 633-acre Audubon Dallas preserve at the western edge of Dallas County, with about nine miles of trails through prairie, woodland and escarpment hills.
• The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza — 24 mi
  A plow-company warehouse of 1903, identified by the Warren Commission as the building Oswald fired from, now a museum on its sixth and seventh floors above Dealey Plaza.
• Dallas Heritage Village at Old City Park — 24 mi
  Dallas's first city park, laid out around Browder's Spring in 1876, now a museum of historic buildings moved here from across North Texas, among them Millermore, a cotton planter's mansion.

More markers nearby

• Midlothian Presbyterian Church — 0.6 mi
• Site of Polytechnic Institute — 0.8 mi
• Site of Old Hawkins Springs — 1.1 mi
• Sardis Cemetery — 5.4 mi