Historical Marker
Plum Grove Baptist Church and Cemetery
La Grange, Fayette County · Texas
Erected 2001
The congregation took its name from the community now called Plum. Tennessee families settled there on grants made to Andrew Castleman in 1828 and John Cooke in 1831, and the Handbook ranks it the second-oldest community in Fayette County. On July 8, 1861, the Plum Grove Rifles organized under Capt. Thomas C. Moore. A post office opened in 1880, and by 1900 the town had two churches, two stores, two gins, two blacksmith shops, a saloon and a physician. By the 1980s it had dwindled to ninety-five people, before Austin Chalk oil revived the local economy.
What the plaque says
Plum Grove Baptist Church and Cemetery This cemetery is the enduring physical reminder of the Baptist congregation that worshiped at this site from 1870 until about 1904. Plum Grove Baptist Church and the Pleasant Retreat Baptist Church of Christ combined their congregations in 1869 and built a sanctuary the following year. Church services were held once a month with annual revival meetings until the area population and church membership declined about the turn of the 20th century. The first burial in the church's cemetery, that of four-year-old William A. Routh, took place in 1872. Burials ceased in 1945, until a new section opened for interments in 1985. (2001)
Where it stands
29.93457, -96.95809 · Directions
Worth the stop nearby
- Monument Hill and Kreische Brewery State Historic Sites — 5.9 miA shared tomb on the Colorado River bluff for the men of the Dawson fight and the black bean lottery, beside the ruins of a German stonemason's spring-fed brewery.
- St. John the Baptist Catholic Church (Ammannsville) — 12 miA wooden Carpenter Gothic church built in 1919 after storm and fire took two before it, its dusty-rose interior painted by an artist whose name was lost for decades.
- Texas Wendish Heritage Museum — 13 miA museum at Serbin of the Wends, a Slavic people from Lusatia whose congregation of nearly 600 crossed on the Ben Nevis in 1854, losing seventy-three to cholera on the way.
- Nativity of Mary, Blessed Virgin Catholic Church (High Hill) — 15 miA red brick Gothic Revival church of 1906 in a German farm settlement, where two San Antonio painters spent 1912 faking marble columns and stone vaults on wood.