Pleasant Mound Methodist Church

The community the congregation came from had a name nobody could spell. The Handbook of Texas says Scyene, first called Prairie Creek and Thorpville, took its name in 1854 with a post office. James Beeman proposed Seine, but his neighbors did not trust his spelling and sent in Sceyne, which was altered to Scyene. The Handbook says Belle Starr moved there in 1864 and lists the Younger and James brothers among its visitors. The Texas and Pacific bypassed Scyene in 1873, when it had nearly 300 people, six saloons and twenty-six businesses.

What the plaque says

Pleasant Mound Methodist Church This congregation traces its history to a Union Church in Scyene, a small farming community once located at the present intersection of Scyene and St. Augustine Roads in Dallas. The first church in the community was a two-story community meeting house that also served as a general store, Masonic Lodge, and school. Several denominations worshiped together, a tradition which continued after the Methodists built a log sanctuary in 1876. In 1878 the church moved to the Pleasant Mound Community (then 3 miles east of Dallas, now within the city). Newton J. and Catherine Beeman Hustead donated land at the northwest corner of Scyene Road and Buckner Boulevard for a church and cemetery. A new house of worship, completed in 1881, was replaced by a larger structure in 1885. A growing membership and storm damage to the building led to the construction of another sanctuary in 1895. After 1900 the other denominations that had been meeting with the Methodists began to form their own congregations. Members of the various congregations met together for annual homecomings from 1910 to 1953. Land at this site was purchased, and a new Methodist sanctuary was completed in 1954. (1990)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fair Park — 5.3 mi
  The State Fair of Texas grounds since 1886, where the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition left one of the country's greatest concentrations of Art Deco exposition buildings.
• African American Museum, Dallas — 5.4 mi
  Founded in 1974 at Bishop College, a free Fair Park museum holding the Sepia photograph archive, African art and A. Maceo Smith's papers, and the story of the Hall of Negro Life.
• Dallas Heritage Village at Old City Park — 6.6 mi
  Dallas's first city park, laid out around Browder's Spring in 1876, now a museum of historic buildings moved here from across North Texas, among them Millermore, a cotton planter's mansion.
• Dallas Museum of Art — 7.6 mi
  A city art museum that began as the Dallas Art Association in 1903, grew up in Fair Park, and has stood in the Arts District since 1984 under a forty-foot barrel vault.

More markers nearby

• Pleasant Grove Christian Church — 1.0 mi
• Pleasant Mound "Public" Cemetery — 1.0 mi
• Pleasant Mound Cemetery — 1.1 mi
• Site of Scyene Meeting Place — 1.5 mi