Methodism in Panhandle

Panhandle's Methodists lived through the town's most notorious crime. On October 10, 1897, hours after preaching to his Panhandle City congregation on the text that the wages of sin is death, the pastor George E. Morrison poisoned his wife with strychnine so that he could take up with another woman. Tried at Vernon on a change of venue from Carson County, he was convicted. Days before his execution he joined an attempted jailbreak, Governor Sayers refused his sister's plea for commutation, and he was hanged at Vernon in October 1899.

What the plaque says

Methodism in Panhandle The town of Panhandle became an important stronghold for Methodism in this part of Texas in the late 19th century. The county's first congregation was the Northern Methodist, established in 1889. It was attended by residents of all faiths. A Southern Methodist congregation was organized in 1903, and both churches served as community gathering places. The two congregations merged in 1919 and eventually became the First United Methodist Church of Panhandle. Methodists in Panhandle have maintained a strong community involvement. (1990)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Carson County Square House Museum — steps away
  The 1880s ranch cottage that is the oldest house in the town of Panhandle, at the heart of a twenty-one-building museum of the plains from mammoth hunters to the oil boom.
• Gem Theatre — 16 mi
  Claude's small-town movie house of 1915, restored by the Armstrong County Museum and remembered for the scene in Hud where Homer and Lonnie Bannon sing along to Clementine.
• Hutchinson County Museum — 22 mi
  Borger's museum on the three-mile Main Street of a 1926 oil boom town that drew 45,000 people in ninety days and was put under martial law in 1929.
• Lake Meredith National Recreation Area — 23 mi
  A Canadian River reservoir in 200-foot breaks, built to water the Panhandle's cities, that fell to a record 26 feet deep in 2013 and still rises and falls with the drought.

More markers nearby

• First Baptist Church of Panhandle — steps away
• Temple Lea Houston — steps away
• Finch-Lord-Nelson and the Founding of Panhandle City — steps away
• Old County Bookmobile, First "Inside Service" Bookmobile in Texas — steps away