Organization of First Protestant Worship in Austin

William Youel Allen came to Austin already busy in the young republic. A Kentuckian trained at Centre College and Princeton Theological Seminary, he reached Texas in March 1838 and preached in Houston his first Sunday. He was chaplain of the Texas Senate in 1838 and organized a Houston church in March 1839. With Sam Houston's support he held the first temperance meeting in Texas, and he drafted the first act of the Texas Congress on education. He left Texas in February 1842 and became president of Centre College in 1845.

What the plaque says

Organization of First Protestant Worship in Austin The city of Austin, Republic of Texas, was founded in 1839. Among its first settlers were Richard Bullock and James Burke, former elders of Presbyterian churches in the United States. That Autumn, at a time when no protestant church had yet been established in Austin, the Rev. William Youel Allen (1805-85) came from Houston to visit in Bullock's hotel, at this site. On Oct. 13, 1839, in the hotel, he preached and organized a Presbyterian congregation. There were six members, with Bullock and Burke as the ruling elders. (1975)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Texas State Capitol — 0.5 mi
  Austin's fourth statehouse, a Renaissance Revival capitol of 1888 that stands 311 feet to its Goddess of Liberty and was restored after the 1983 fire.
• French Legation State Historic Site — 0.7 mi
  A raised pine house built in 1840 and 1841 for France's envoy to the Republic of Texas, who left Austin in a rage over a neighbor's pigs before it was finished.
• Bullock Texas State History Museum — 0.9 mi
  The state's history museum at the head of Congress Avenue, built around the hull of La Salle's ship La Belle, raised from Matagorda Bay with 1.8 million artifacts.
• Texas State Cemetery — 1.0 mi
  A hill east of the Capitol that began with one general's grave in 1851 and now holds Stephen F. Austin, governors, Barbara Jordan and more than 2,000 Confederate veterans and widows.

More markers nearby

• Site of John Bremond & Company — steps away
• Texas and the Civil War State Military Board — steps away
• Site of the Official Residence of Mirabeau B. Lamar — steps away
• Original Site of First Methodist Church of Austin — steps away