Historical Marker
Greater Zion Missionary Baptist Church
Houston, Harris County · Texas
Erected 2008
The plaque says only that tradition credits the Rev. Gilbert Green; the church's own sketch keeps a founder's account. In the fall of 1881, it says, Green walked into the Curtis home north of Calhoun Street and asked the women visiting there whether they would like a church home. Nettie Jones was first on her feet. The women raised ten dollars, Green added ten, and the twenty bought lumber; Green, Jones and four other women hauled brush from McGowen Street to the site. In 1965 Moses L. Price became president of the Missionary Baptist General Convention of Texas.
What the plaque says
Greater Zion Missionary Baptist Church Members of Greater Zion Missionary Baptist Church have served residents of Houston's Greater Third Ward since the late 1800s. Tradition holds that the Rev. Gilbert Green and several area residents organized the church, which first met under a brush arbor at this location. The Rev. Green was the first pastor of what was then known as Little Zion Missionary Baptist Church. Early pastors encouraged growth in the African American congregation, whose members often had to work in very low-paying jobs. Soon, the congregation turned toward serving the Greater Third Ward. Community programs flourished, particularly under the Rev. Moses Leonard Price, the longest serving pastor for the church (1938-1984). The Rev. Price was involved in numerous community, social and religious organizations. He focused the members' time and resources especially toward educational programs. Under his pastorate, the church opened a kindergarten, started a scholarship fund and implemented the summer enrichment program to offer tutoring for area students. After building the current sanctuary on the adjacent block in 1958, the church opened an educational building on its former site. Members have also run a food pantry, offered donations to the needy and developed a program to build affordable homes in the neighborhood. Besides the church's pastors, a number of members have been vital community leaders. Several former members have also become pastors of other churches. Today, Greater Zion Missionary Baptist Church continues to serve as a spiritual, social, cultural and economic leader in Houston. (2008)
Where it stands
29.73652, -95.35265 · Directions
Worth the stop nearby
- Emancipation Park — 0.8 miThe Third Ward park that freedpeople bought for Juneteenth in 1872, rebuilt in 2017 on Emancipation Avenue and still the center of the city's June 19 celebration.
- Buffalo Soldiers National Museum — 1.5 miA museum in Houston's 1925 Light Guard Armory that tells the service of Black soldiers from the Revolutionary War onward, built from one veteran's thirty years of collecting.
- Sam Houston Park and the Heritage Society — 2.0 miTen historic buildings gathered in a downtown park below the skyscrapers, among them the 1870 house of the Reverend Jack Yates, built five years after emancipation.
- Museum of Fine Arts, Houston — 2.4 miThe oldest art museum in Texas, grown from a 1900 schoolroom art league into a campus of Watkin, Mies van der Rohe and later buildings, with Ima Hogg's Bayou Bend up the bayou.