First United Methodist Church of Taft

The plaque notes the circuit's thousand dollars for a new university in 1911; that school was Southern Methodist University. It was the project of the Texas Educational Commission, drawn from the five Texas conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, which took ownership in 1911. In 1914 the church's General Conference made it the connectional university for all its conferences west of the Mississippi. Robert S. Hyer was its first president. It opened in Dallas on September 22, 1915, with 706 students in two buildings on a bare hillside, and it is still related to the Methodist Church.

What the plaque says

First United Methodist Church of Taft E. A. Hunter was appointed pastor to the Taft, Gregory, Portland and Ingleside circuit in 1910. Methodists in Taft and Gregory worked together to build Methodist worship and religious education in the area. A Methodist Sunday school had been meeting in Gregory since 1876. The Rev. Mr. Hunter organized the Taft Methodist Church in December 1910. The Rev. R. C. Aubrey was assigned to the circuit in 1911. The Taft and Gregory congregations held a joint revival, bringing in forty new Methodists. The entire circuit pooled its funds in order to raise a thousand dollars for the building of the new Southern Methodist University in 1911, as well. The Methodist and Presbyterian congregations in Taft shared the Coleman-Fulton Pasture Company assembly hall and later the Taft School building. The two congregations built a new facility in 1921 on land given by the Coleman-Fulton Pasture Company. It was the first permanent church building in Taft. The two groups separated in 1923 when Methodists decided to erect their own building. That year the Methodist and Presbyterian congregations in Gregory voted to merge with the Taft churches. In November 1924 a new Taft Methodist Church building was completed. The church continued to grow, erecting new facilities as needed. A new sanctuary was formally opened on Easter Sunday, 1949. Membership increased dramatically in the 1950s, and plans for a new educational plant began in 1954 and were expanded in 1955. The Taft United Methodist Church congregation has been active in the community, from the Epworth League (organized in 1924) to a lay witness program begun in the 1980s to the modern family programs organized in the 1990s. (2000)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• USS Lexington Museum on the Bay — 11 mi
  An Essex-class carrier of 1943 moored off North Beach, the Blue Ghost that Tokyo Rose kept reporting sunk, and the Navy's training carrier for nearly three decades after.
• Texas State Aquarium — 11 mi
  A nonprofit aquarium on the tip of Corpus Christi Beach built around the Gulf and the Caribbean, with the largest coastal wildlife rescue center in Texas behind the exhibits.
• Art Museum of South Texas — 12 mi
  Philip Johnson's 1972 museum on the Corpus Christi bayfront, joined in 2006 by Ricardo Legorreta's Miller Wing, holding more than 2,000 works mostly from Texas and the Americas.
• Mirador de la Flor — 13 mi
  Corpus Christi's bayfront memorial to Selena Quintanilla-Pérez, the Tejano singer from this city, killed in 1995 at twenty-three, visited by about thirty thousand people a year.

More markers nearby

• Coleman-Fulton Pasture Company — steps away
• President William Howard Taft Visits Taft — steps away
• Taft Agricultural Industrial Complex — 0.4 mi
• Gregory — 7.3 mi