Mobeetie United Methodist Church

Peter W. Gravis, one of the two preachers of 1881, spent a quarter century as a Methodist circuit rider in the Panhandle. Born in Nashville in 1828, he came to Texas as a boy in 1838 with Robertson's Colony, preached at Comanche around 1868 and served the Iredell church from 1869 into the mid-1870s. In 1892 he wrote and published his autobiography, Twenty-Five Years on the Outside Row of the Northwest Texas Annual Conference, which was reissued in 1966. His wife Mary died in 1895, and he died in 1902. His papers are at the Briscoe Center.

What the plaque says

Mobeetie United Methodist Church Mobeetie developed from a buffalo hunters camp established in 1874 and Fort Elliott, which opened in 1875. Methodists Peter Gravis and J.T. Hosmer preached in the town in 1881, and by 1884, Mobeetie had a mission Methodist congregation. An 1898 tornado destroyed the sanctuary and most other buildings in town. In 1905, the community erected a shared Union Church building later bought by the Methodist congregation. The town moved closer to the railroad in the late 1920s. In 1930, church members built a basement in New Mobeetie and moved their worship services there. They built the present sanctuary in 1947, and the church continues to serve as an area spiritual center. (2006)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Old Mobeetie Jail Museum — 1.1 mi
  The 1886 stone jail of the Panhandle's first county seat, the buffalo hunters' Hidetown on Sweetwater Creek that ran the courts for fifteen counties before losing its fort, railroad hopes and county seat.
• Roberts County Museum — 16 mi
  The county museum in Miami's old Santa Fe depot, holding mammoth bones and Clovis points from a 1934 dig, in the cow town that has held a cow-calling contest since 1949.
• Devil's Rope and Old Route 66 Museum — 23 mi
  Barbed wire and the Texas road in McLean's old brassiere factory: the fence that closed the open range, from the salesmen who sold it to the Panhandle ranches it divided.
• Phillips 66 Station, McLean — 23 mi
  A 1929 cottage-style Phillips 66 station on First Street in McLean, the town I-40 went around last and whose Route 66 business district stayed much as it was.

More markers nearby

• Mobeetie First Baptist Church — steps away
• Mobeetie Post Office — steps away
• Mobeetie — 1.2 mi
• Buffalo Soldiers at Fort Elliott — 1.5 mi