Original Site of First Baptist Church of Austin

Robert Hay Taliaferro came to Austin as a missionary of the American Baptist Home Mission Society, a Kentuckian converted while a student at Granville, Ohio, and ordained in 1846. In 1848 he published Evidences of Christianity through the Austin Democrat. He pastored the Galveston church in 1849-50 and spent two years as a missionary among the Choctaw in western Arkansas before returning to Austin. When the debt-burdened congregation began its 1857 church, he preached without pay for three years and taught school to support his family. He was chaplain of the Texas Senate from 1870 to 1875.

What the plaque says

Original Site of First Baptist Church of Austin The Rev. R. H. Taliaferro of Kentucky organized the First Baptist Church in July 1847. Worship services were first held in the Capitol and later moved to a frame building at 12th and Lavaca. The congregation met in the 700 block of Congress Avenue until it built its first sanctuary at this site in 1857. The structure was remodeled in the 1880s. A larger brick church was constructed here in 1916. It was razed when the congregation moved to 9th and Trinity in 1970. Many governors, state officials, and prominent Austin families worshiped at this location. (1985)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Texas State Capitol — 0.2 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.
• Bullock Texas State History Museum — 0.6 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.
• 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.
• Harry Ransom Center — 0.8 mi
  The University of Texas archive where a Gutenberg Bible and the earliest surviving camera photograph are always on view, free, beside the papers of Watergate and the movies.

More markers nearby

• Governor Elisha Marshall Pease — steps away
• Henry Smith — steps away
• Governor James Edward Ferguson, Governor Miriam A. Ferguson — steps away
• Governor Edmund Jackson Davis — steps away