Hawkins Chapel

Loving was once part of the Lost Valley Loving Ranch and was named for the Oliver Loving family. The Handbook of Texas says the town moved about a mile north to reach the Gulf, Texas and Western when it was built through in 1910, though other sources place the first town two miles east. B. B. Cain of the Trinity Townsite Company platted the new town. By the 1930s Loving had a school, a bank and several churches, and raised grain and poultry. It reached 350 people in 1940 and had 300 in 2000.

What the plaque says

S. J. Hawkins (1821-1908), whose parents came to Texas from Kentucky in 1846, brought his family to this frontier area in 1876. His brother, F. J. Hawkins, and others soon joined him. Their pioneer community was centered at this site, where a school was built in 1879. A nearby brush arbor sheltered the annual summer camp meeting beginning in 1882. Hawkins Chapel Methodist Church was erected in 1884, and the first burial in the adjacent cemetery was in 1889. The school closed in 1910 and the church in 1916, but the cemetery is still in use. Descendants of early settlers hold a reunion here each summer. (1975)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Old Post Office Museum and Art Center — 14 mi
  Graham's 1936 Art Moderne post office, with a New Deal mural by Alexandre Hogue inside, now the free museum of Young County in the town where the Texas cattle raisers first organized.
• Fort Belknap — 17 mi
  The 1851 northern anchor of the first Texas frontier forts, on the Brazos below Newcastle, a Butterfield stop and the post beside the Brazos Reservation until its people were driven out in 1859.
• Royal Theater — 21 mi
  Archer City's movie house, burned in 1965, given a false front for The Last Picture Show and brought back by the town in the 1990s as a working stage on Main Street.
• Fort Richardson State Park and Historic Site — 22 mi
  The northernmost post of the Texas frontier line, outside Jacksboro, where a stone hospital and six other buildings stand from 1867 and a later Guard unit became the Lost Battalion.

More markers nearby

• Townsite of Old Farmer — 4.0 mi
• Site of Loving Ranch House — 6.0 mi
• Community of Jermyn — 7.5 mi
• Britt Johnson — 9.9 mi