First United Methodist Church of Rising Star

Rising Star had a claim on the county's oil before Ranger did: the Handbook of Texas says the first oil found in Eastland County turned up near the town in 1909. A major strike did not come until 1920, near the end of the county's boom. Town officials passed strict building rules to keep out tents and shanties, so speculators and oil workers hastily built a town five miles west. In just over a year that town was gone and the boom was over. Pecans and peanuts later replaced cotton.

What the plaque says

First United Methodist Church of Rising Star Rising Star was only a sparsely settled community when schoolteacher James Irby organized this congregation in 1879. The Rev. L.S. Chamberlain of Sipe Springs led the first service, which was attended by Irby, his wife Sallie, and Dennis Bond, in a small log building east of the present town. The congregation worshiped at several locations before 1888, when member Lucy L. Anderson donated a plot of ground for the building of a small frame structure at the present site, where the church held worship services and Sunday school classes for nearly forty years. In 1903 the Rev. D.A. McGuire was appointed to serve the First Methodist Church of Rising Star and became the fellowship's first full-time pastor. The 1920 oil boom brought new members into the church, resulting in the need for larger facilities. The current church building was completed in 1926 during the pastorate of the Rev. Fizer M. Noe. For more than one hundred years, the First United Methodist Church of Rising Star has provided the community with significant service and leadership. Its emphasis on Christian education and mission work has produced a number of ministers and missionaries from among its members. (1984)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lake Brownwood State Park — 17 mi
  A CCC park on a reservoir that filled in a single flood before its dam was done, with stone cabins, a hilltop dance pavilion and a grand staircase climbed by dancers arriving by boat.
• Conrad Hilton Center and Mobley Hotel — 20 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 — 23 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.

More markers nearby

• Rising Star — 0.3 mi
• The May Community — 8.3 mi
• Cross Cut Cemetery — 11 mi
• Cross Plains Review — 12 mi