Pleasant Hill Missionary Baptist Church

Around 1859, a history of Rusk County Cumberland Presbyterians says, the Pleasant Hill Presbyterians traded their property to the Baptists of London and moved to London themselves. Two churches formed from Pleasant Hill members in the late 1850s, and Mt. Hope formed around 1860, partly because it was closer to some of them than London. Baptist association records list a Pleasant Hill church at New London, organized between 1855 and 1859 and affiliated with the American Baptist Association.

What the plaque says

Pleasant Hill Missionary Baptist Church Captain Robert W. Smith (1814-51), a veteran of the Texas Revolution, donated land at this site in 1845 for use by a Cumberland Presbyterian Church. The first building here, a log chapel, was also used for school classes. In 1856 the property was traded to a congregation of Baptists from the nearby community of London (4 mi. NW). Organized that year as Pleasant Hill Missionary Baptist Church, the fellowship has continued to worship here. The church and adjacent cemetery were legally separated in 1953 by court decree. (1980)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• New London Museum and Cenotaph — 3.6 mi
  A volunteer-run museum beside the pink granite cenotaph for the March 1937 school gas explosion, holding a model of the school, a blackboard from that day and an odorizer device.
• East Texas Oil Museum — 12 mi
  A Kilgore College museum that rebuilds the 1930s oil boom in a full-scale Boomtown with a general store, drugstore and newspaper office, plus dioramas, films and antiques given by East Texans.
• Camp Ford Historic Park — 26 mi
  A free county park north of Tyler on the site of the largest Confederate prison camp west of the Mississippi, with a kiosk, an interpretive trail and a historical society museum downtown.
• Goodman-LeGrand House and Museum — 26 mi
  A Tyler house begun in 1859 as four rooms, enlarged by the Goodman family over 73 years, and left to the city in 1939 with its furnishings, in a garden that fills a city block.

More markers nearby

• Pleasant Hill Cemetery — steps away
• Joiner No. 3 Daisy Bradford — 2.9 mi
• New London School Explosion — 3.6 mi
• Judge William Wright Morris — 6.4 mi