Mount Vernon United Methodist Church

The Handbook of Texas calls this congregation the oldest institution in the Fifth Ward. Freedmen settled the thinly peopled land north of Buffalo Bayou after the Civil War, and the ward took its name in 1866, when it gained an alderman on the city council; in 1870 it counted 578 Black and 561 White residents. Fires in 1891 and 1912 set it back, the second burning 119 houses and St. Patrick's Catholic Church. By 1925 Lyons Avenue had forty Black-owned businesses, and Phillis Wheatley High School counted 2,600 students in 1927.

What the plaque says

Mount Vernon United Methodist Church This congregation originated in 1865, and is one of the oldest in Houston. The Rev. Emanuel Toby (also called "Uncle Toby" or Toby Gregg) and friends cut brush, built an arbor on Vine Street near the banks of Buffalo Bayou, and began to worship there. In 1867 Toby bought the Vine Street site for five dollars from his ex-master, Darius Gregg. Also in 1867, the Rev. Charles Bryant, a West Indian, came to Houston as a Methodist missionary. In "Uncle Toby's church under the hill," he found 25 probationers and 50 members. By 1871, when the congregation bought the Vine Street property from Toby and erected its original frame chapel, the church had 122 members. Renamed Mount Vernon Methodist Episcopal Church in 1879, the congregation moved to this permanent location in 1901. This site's original structure was built mostly by the personal labor of the Rev. C. C. Minnegan. The present sanctuary was constructed in 1935; the educational unit, in 1956. This congregation helped establish the Brooks Chapel United Methodist Church, regularly provides many social services, aids the needy, and has produced community leaders for more than a century. (1977)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sam Houston Park and the Heritage Society — 2.1 mi
  Ten historic buildings gathered in a downtown park below the skyscrapers, among them the 1870 house of the Reverend Jack Yates, built five years after emancipation.
• Emancipation Park — 3.0 mi
  The Third Ward park that freedpeople bought for Juneteenth in 1872, rebuilt in 2017 on Emancipation Avenue and still the center of the city's June 19 celebration.
• Buffalo Soldiers National Museum — 3.4 mi
  A museum in Houston's 1925 Light Guard Armory that tells the service of Black soldiers from the Revolutionary War onward, built from one veteran's thirty years of collecting.
• Rothko Chapel — 4.1 mi
  An octagonal chapel open to all faiths, built by the de Menils around fourteen dark canvases by Mark Rothko, with Barnett Newman's Broken Obelisk standing in the pool outside.

More markers nearby

• Payne Chapel A.M.E. Church — 0.5 mi
• The Frenchtown Community — 0.7 mi
• Peacock Records — 0.8 mi
• Frost Town — 0.9 mi