Prince Memorial CME Church

Prince Memorial belongs to a church Black Methodists built after emancipation. The Handbook of Texas says many enslaved people worshiped with their enslavers, some even after freedom. In 1866 the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, let Black members form separate congregations and conferences; by 1870 they had organized five annual conferences and asked for their own church. The Colored Methodist Episcopal Church was organized at Jackson, Tennessee, in December 1870, and the West Texas Conference followed in 1871. Texas's first CME church stood in Marshall. In 1954 the General Conference changed the name to Christian Methodist Episcopal.

What the plaque says

Prince Memorial CME Church In the 1840s and 1850s, the Methodist Church in America experienced several splits over the slavery question. When the newly formed Methodist Episcopal Church, South, affirmed its commitment to race-based chattel slavery, many African Americans who had found solace in that church left to form their own denomination, named the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church (formerly "Colored Methodist Episcopal Church.") The Reverend R.A. Eddleman (1812-1891), the first leader of the new congregation in Weatherford, named the church after the Reverend A. Bartlett Prince (1820-1905), a charter member and presiding elder of the West Texas Conference. Other charter members included Henry Johnson, Emily Washington, Clarissa Mosley, Lucy A. Norton, Samuel Washington, James Rachel, America Rachel and George Dawson. Henry Johnson was appointed class leader and Stephen Carter and Joseph Davis, stewards. Prince Memorial CME Church is one of the earliest established CME churches in the state, the others being Allen Chapel in Fort Worth and Reedy Chapel in Galveston. In 1871, the Prince Memorial CME church building was constructed in Weatherford at West Oak Street between Brazos and Lamar under the leadership of Bishop Miles. According to church records, the congregation has been meeting in the same location since its founding. The 1871 building was wood frame construction and held about 250 people. In its earliest days, the building served the black community as a church. For more than 150 years, Prince Memorial CME church has been an enduring and uplifting presence for the Weatherford community. (2022)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Chandor Gardens — 0.4 mi
  A portrait painter's English-and-Chinese garden rooms, blasted and planted from a bare 3.5-acre hillside in Weatherford beginning in 1936, abandoned after 1978 and reopened by the city in 2002.
• Lake Mineral Wells State Park and Trailway — 15 mi
  A Cross Timbers park on the old Camp Wolters grounds, built around a 1922 water-supply lake for a spa town, with Penitentiary Hollow's rock climbing and a 20-mile trailway.
• Granbury Courthouse Square — 22 mi
  A National Register square of limestone storefronts around W. C. Dodson's Second Empire courthouse, whose clock tower citizens saved after a 1968 tornado.
• Acton State Historic Site — 23 mi
  The smallest state historic site in Texas, a grave plot holding Elizabeth Crockett, widow of David Crockett, under a 1913 statue of a pioneer woman shading her eyes toward the west.

More markers nearby

• Weatherford — 0.3 mi
• Parker County, C.S.A. — 0.3 mi
• Governor S.W.T. Lanham — 0.4 mi
• Samuel Joseph Redgate — 0.6 mi