Pilot Grove Baptist Church

Bluford and Rebecca Clement built the first log house at Pilot Grove, and the village grew around it. Their home changed horses for the stage between Bonham and McKinney, and a local account credits them with the first school. Bluford's store sold goods on credit against deer skins. Early Pilot Grove also had a race track and a gang called brush men; a 1907 writer described a church-going village without them. Bluford drowned in the Sulphur River in 1860. The Handbook says the village had three churches and a school by 1885 and lost its post office in 1904.

What the plaque says

Pilot Grove Baptist Church This congregation traces its history to the establishment of the United Baptist Church here in 1848 on 3.5 acres of land donated by Hezakiah Warden. By 1850 the town of Pilot Grove contained the Baptist Church, a post office, grist mill, drugstore, several saloons, and a cotton gin. Warden donated an acre of land along Pilot Grove Creek to the Baptist Church in 1854. Pilot Grove Baptist Church was established as a mission of the United Baptist Church by Elders John A. Piars, Benjamin Watson, and George F. Calor, and a number of other charter members in 1858. Early worship services were held in members' homes and in a local schoolhouse until a sanctuary was built in 1876. During this time and until the early 1970s new converts were baptized in nearby Pilot Grove Creek. According to local tradition the original sanctuary was destroyed in a tornado and replaced with a new church building at this site in 1917. During World War II the town of Pilot Grove began a rapid decline and today is a small rural community with only this congregation and two cemeteries remaining. Pilot Grove Baptist Church nevertheless continues a tradition of hosting social events and providing worship services for the community. (1994)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sam Rayburn House State Historic Site — 15 mi
  The two-story farmhouse west of Bonham that the longtime Speaker of the House built in 1916 and kept as his home, left as he lived in it and open as a museum since 1975.
• Eisenhower Birthplace State Historic Site — 22 mi
  The small frame house beside the Katy tracks in Denison where Dwight Eisenhower was born in 1890, bought by townspeople in 1946 and given to Texas in 1958.
• Heard Natural Science Museum & Wildlife Sanctuary — 22 mi
  A 289-acre sanctuary in McKinney that Bessie Heard founded at the age of 80, with five habitats, a 50-acre wetland and 6.5 miles of trails.
• Hagerman National Wildlife Refuge — 28 mi
  A 1946 refuge on the Big Mineral Arm of Lake Texoma, laid over land bought for Denison Dam and the site of the vanished railroad town of Hagerman, now a winter stop for geese.

More markers nearby

• Pilot Grove — steps away
• James P. Dumas — 2.9 mi
• Old Town of Cannon — 3.4 mi
• Cannon Cemetery — 4.7 mi