Long Branch Baptist Church

The church is younger than the burial ground beside it. According to a 2004 survey of Long Branch Cemetery, the oldest grave is Francis Elizabeth Covington's from 1882, three years before the church was organized on land given by R. B. Covington. A stone for James Wesley Morgan claims to be the first interment but is dated 1884. The cemetery also holds Confederate officer Major James T. Poe and R. M. Bishop, who died in France in World War I.

What the plaque says

Long Branch Baptist Church Formally organized on July 16, 1885, the Long Branch Baptist Church held its first worship services in an old schoolhouse on land donated by R.B. Covington. The thirteen charter members were served by W.B. Cobb, the church's first minister, until August 1886. Missionary pastors continued to hold monthly services over the years. The congregation, which built its first sanctuary on this site in 1905-06, has provided significant service to the Long Branch Community and the surrounding area throughout its history. (1985)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Conrad Hilton Center and Mobley Hotel — 13 mi
  The 40-room oil-boom hotel in Cisco that Conrad Hilton bought in 1919 when a bank deal fell through, now a museum of the Hilton start and of Cisco's 1927 Santa Claus bank robbery.
• Old Rip at the Eastland County Courthouse — 13 mi
  A horned lizard in a glass-topped casket in the 1928 Eastland courthouse, the creature said to have come out alive from the old building's cornerstone after thirty-one years.

More markers nearby

• First Baptist Church in Carbon — 5.4 mi
• Mangum Baptist Church — 7.3 mi
• First United Methodist Church of Rising Star — 9.5 mi
• Rising Star — 9.6 mi