Lissie United Methodist Church

Lissie began as New Philadelphia, a Welsh colony. In 1878 the Workmen's Emigration Society sent families from the Rhymney and Rhondda valleys to Texas on a London offer of a house, tools, cattle, hens and monthly grocery credit until the first crop. The Handbook of Texas says the credit stopped when the society's money failed to arrive, some families came too late to plant, and disputes with open-range cattlemen followed. Within ten years only five or six families remained. A fire burned most of the town.

What the plaque says

Lissie United Methodist Church Organized in 1906 as the Evangelical Association, this congregation began with nineteen charter members. The Rev. George W. Causey served as first pastor. A sanctuary and parsonage were dedicated in 1907. After a division within the association, the two factions reunited in 1922 as the Evangelical United Brethren Church in 1946, and as Lissie United Methodist Church in 1968. The church continues to serve the people of Lissie and the surrounding community. (1988)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Attwater Prairie Chicken National Wildlife Refuge — 7.8 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.
• San Felipe de Austin State Historic Site — 19 mi
  Stephen F. Austin's colonial capital on a Brazos bluff, the town of the Consultation and the first Texas newspapers, burned by its own garrison in the Runaway Scrape of 1836.
• Stafford Opera House — 22 mi
  A cattleman's bank and theater of 1886 on the Columbus square, in a river town Sam Houston burned in 1836 and a county marked by a long feud and a 1935 lynching.

More markers nearby

• Lakeside Sugar Refinery — 6.4 mi
• E. H. Henry Rosenwald School — 6.7 mi
• Hotel Dallas, 1912 — 6.9 mi
• Rice Culture in Colorado County — 6.9 mi