Richard Brown

The Pine Grove church Richard Brown helped found was Cumberland Presbyterian. One history dates it to 1849 near Pine Hill, in a log cabin; a Rusk County cemetery site says about 1850 and names the Rev. Archibald H. Watkins as a key early minister. The surviving building dates to 1870 and is called the oldest existing church building in Rusk County. The congregation disbanded around 1905 or 1906. The church became a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1966, a homecoming meets on the fourth Sunday in April, and Brown and his wife Nancy Jane lie in the cemetery.

What the plaque says

Richard Brown (November 16, 1808 - August 24, 1893) An 1836-37 Republic of Texas soldier who joined the 1842 Mier Expedition to punish Mexican invasions of Texas. Captured in Mexico, he escaped firing squad by drawing a white bean, but was chained in prison for two years. The well-educated son of a Philadelphia, PA. doctor, Brown worked as a teacher, surveyor, and farmer. Helped found Pine Grove Church and Sharon Masonic Lodge. In 1849 he married Nancy Jane Cook; they had twelve children. (1971)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Tex Ritter Museum and Texas Country Music Hall of Fame — 19 mi
  Carthage's country music museum, with Tex Ritter's boots, guitars and saddles in a room styled like a movie theater, and exhibits on other Texas stars, Jim Reeves among them.
• New London Museum and Cenotaph — 19 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 — 23 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.

More markers nearby

• Patrick Community — 3.2 mi
• Brachfield — 3.9 mi
• Zion Hill Missionary Baptist Church & Cemetery — 4.0 mi
• Allison Chapel United Methodist Church — 8.0 mi