Highland Park Methodist Church

The sanctuary was finished before it was paid for. A Wikipedia history says architects Mark Lemmon and Roscoe DeWitt designed the building, and that the first service was held on February 6, 1927, with Umphrey Lee as pastor. The congregation dedicated it in 1943, after paying off the construction debt, which took fifteen years and carried the church through the Depression. It began as University Church on the Southern Methodist University campus in February 1916 and joined Methodists of the new town of Highland Park that fall.

What the plaque says

Highland Park Methodist Church This congregation traces its origin to the founding of a church at Southern Methodist University in early February 1916. Known as the University Church, its first members came from the campus community of faculty and students.Methodist Bishop Edwin D. Mouzon appointed the Rev. A. Frank Smith as first pastor. The church gained added support and leadership when Methodist families living in the new suburb of Highland Park transferred their memberships. It was renamed Highland Park Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and at the end of 1916 the charter roll listed 225 members. Southern Methodist University donated land at this site to the church in 1916, and in 1917 the congregation erected a temporary structure known as the "Little Brown Church." The town of Highland Park annexed the church property in 1923, a legal formality that cleared the way for construction of a new Gothic Revival sanctuary in 1926. Due to rapid growth in membership, the church added three new buildings to its main campus between 1950 and 1961. By 1995 membership exceeded 10,500. The congregation continues its historic commitment to community service and international missions. (1994)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Dallas Museum of Art — 3.5 mi
  A city art museum that began as the Dallas Art Association in 1903, grew up in Fair Park, and has stood in the Arts District since 1984 under a forty-foot barrel vault.
• Fair Park — 4.1 mi
  The State Fair of Texas grounds since 1886, where the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition left one of the country's greatest concentrations of Art Deco exposition buildings.
• The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza — 4.1 mi
  A plow-company warehouse of 1903, identified by the Warren Commission as the building Oswald fired from, now a museum on its sixth and seventh floors above Dealey Plaza.
• African American Museum, Dallas — 4.2 mi
  Founded in 1974 at Bishop College, a free Fair Park museum holding the Sepia photograph archive, African art and A. Maceo Smith's papers, and the story of the Hall of Negro Life.

More markers nearby

• Preston Road — 1.1 mi
• Flippen Homestead and the Founding of Highland Park — 1.1 mi
• Zion Lutheran Church — 1.9 mi
• Caruth Pioneer Cemetery — 2.1 mi