Jonesboro Methodist Church

Jonesboro began as Jones Mill. Brothers William L. and David Jones built a steam sawmill and gristmill on the Leon River in 1866, and families settled nearby after the Civil War. The Handbook of Texas says the post office opened in 1871 under that name, and in 1877 the community became Jonesboro. By the mid-1880s it had two steam gristmills and cotton gins, a sawmill, three churches and 350 residents. The railroad bypassed it in 1911. State Highway 36, finished in the 1930s as a government work project, boosted the economy but not the population.

What the plaque says

Jonesboro Methodist Church This congregation traces its history to the late 1860s, when early settlers of Jonesboro met together in a combination church-school Masonic Lodge building for worship services. W. L. Jones donated in 1871, and the congregation was formally organized that year. Their first building, completed in 1871, was replaced by a succession of structures over the years to meet the needs of the membership. Methodist congregations in the nearby communities of Ames, Pancake, and Turnersville have merged with the Jonesboro Church. (1991)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Hamilton County Courthouse — 16 mi
  A limestone courthouse of 1886-87 on the Hamilton square, built after the county's 1878 courthouse burned, enlarged in the early 1930s and rededicated in 2012 after restoration.
• Bosque Museum — 20 mi
  A Clifton museum holding what it calls the largest repository of Norwegian artifacts in the South and Southwest, with Bosque County finds some 10,000 years old and a log cabin built by the Olson family.
• Meridian State Park — 22 mi
  A 505-acre park in Bosque County where World War I veterans of a Civilian Conservation Corps company dammed Bee Creek in 1933-34 for a 72-acre lake and cut stone buildings around it.
• Mother Neff State Park — 31 mi
  A Leon River park that grew from six acres Isabella Neff left the state in her 1921 will, where Civilian Conservation Corps Company 817 built a stone tower, a pavilion and roads in the 1930s.

More markers nearby

• Site of the Ireland School — 6.2 mi
• Murrell School — 6.5 mi
• Purmela Baptist Church — 11 mi
• Lincolnville Community — 13 mi