Primera Baptist Church

Paul C. Bell, the church's pastor, built the Mexican Baptist Institute largely with his own hands, starting in 1923 and finishing in 1926. Its first building held classrooms, orphans, boarding students and teachers, and the congregation met there too; the cornerstone reads "The Lord hath heard my supplication." A farm helped pay the bills, with teachers' salaries from the Home Mission Board, but the Depression and the new Cooperative Program made fund-raising hard. The orphanage closed by 1936, and the institute closed in May 1941 when Bell left to direct Baptist work in Panama.

What the plaque says

Primera Baptist Church On March 1, 1903, Primera Iglesia Bautista organized as the culmination of mission work carried out by Primera Iglesia Bautista of Welder. By 1907, the congregation constructed their first church building, led by the Rev. Paul C. Bell, the growing membership was active in the community, opening a primary and secondary school for the area's unschooled Hispanic children (1920), an orphanage (1920), and a Baptist Bible Institute (1924). Some of the orphans and students later became ministers and missionaries. The congregation moved to a new building in 1928. Members have since continued to minister to English and Spanish-speaking residents of the area. Today Primera Baptist Church remains a beacon of light in the Bastrop community. (2009)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Bastrop State Park — 1.9 mi
  The westernmost loblolly pines in the United States, cut off from the East Texas forest by a hundred miles of post oak, burned almost entirely in 2011 and growing back.
• Texas Wendish Heritage Museum — 20 mi
  A 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.
• McKinney Falls State Park — 25 mi
  Limestone falls on Onion Creek inside Austin, where people camped under a rock overhang for thousands of years and a financier of the Texas Revolution built his stone ranch house.
• Lockhart Courthouse Square — 26 mi
  A cotton-era courthouse town named the Barbecue Capital of Texas, built near the 1840 Plum Creek fight that followed the killing of Comanche leaders at peace talks.

More markers nearby

• Captain James Burleson — 0.3 mi
• Baron de Bastrop Monument — 0.4 mi
• Home Town of Texas Confederate Major Joseph D. Sayers — 0.4 mi
• First National Bank of Bastrop — 0.5 mi