First United Methodist Church of Wharton

Wharton's Methodists trace their roots to a camp meeting at Egypt in 1835, held at the home of W. J. E. Heard, a planter who held enslaved people. The Handbook of Texas calls it purportedly the first such denominational service west of the Trinity River and says White and Black families attended. Circuit riders followed: Homer Thrall, Martin Ruter, who made Heard's house his headquarters, and John Wesley DeVilbiss, who married Talitha Menefee, daughter of a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence. Heard later supported Rutersville College, founded after Ruter's death.

What the plaque says

First United Methodist Church of Wharton Early Methodist services in this area can be traced to 1835 when a camp meeting was held in Egypt. According to local church historians, the Wharton congregation began meeting in 1859 and was officially organized in 1865. Members built a church on Caney Street in 1885, and in 1898 moved to a new site on Fulton Street. Their first sanctuary there was destroyed in a 1909 storm, and its replacement was lost to fire in 1925 along with the church's early records and possibly those of Egypt's original Methodist congregation. Wharton's first ecumenical Vacation Bible School was held at First Methodist Church in 1930. The congregation relocated to this site in 1972 into a structure designed to blend old and new traditions. Methodist churches in Glen Flora, Lane City, and Newgulf merged with the Wharton church in the 1970s and 1980s. (2000)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Attwater Prairie Chicken National Wildlife Refuge — 26 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.
• Varner-Hogg Plantation State Historic Site — 29 mi
  A Brazos sugar plantation built by enslaved people for the Patton family, later leased convict labor and Hogg family oil, now told through Rachel Patton and Sarah Ford.
• Levi Jordan Plantation State Historic Site — 35 mi
  A sugar and cotton plantation on the San Bernard River whose enslaved builders and their descendants left one of the best-preserved African American archeological sites in Texas.

More markers nearby

• Shearith Israel Synagogue — 0.4 mi
• First Baptist Church of Wharton — 0.9 mi
• St. Paul Lutheran Church — 0.9 mi
• Judge George E. Quinan — 1.2 mi