Rock Springs Cumberland Presbyterian Church

James B. Sadler's church anchored the largest Black community in Bosque County, the Sadler Colony at Rock Springs. A 2025 Chisholm Country article says he was born enslaved in Tennessee and came to Texas with his owner and possible father, John Kincaid Sadler. His granddaughter, Bertha Sadler Means, wrote that he built the first Colored Cumberland Presbyterian Church in Texas so his people could worship and govern themselves. The article says he also helped establish the Meridian church in 1879, and that the county's Black settlements had dispersed by the 1940s.

What the plaque says

Rock Springs Cumberland Presbyterian Church The Rev. James B. Sadler (1828-1911), a self-educated former slave, started this black congregation in 1870 and helped establish a separate black Presbytery in 1876. Worship services were held in a nearby brush arbor or in homes until the present structure was erected in 1890. This building also housed a community school for a time. The Rev. Sadler and his wife, Susan, owned the property until 1909. It was then deeded to church officers, who maintain the church and adjacent cemetery today. The congregation's annual homecoming is held in November. (1975)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Bosque Museum — 12 mi
  A Clifton museum holding what it calls the largest repository of Norwegian artifacts in the South and Southwest, with Bosque County finds some 10,000 years old and a log cabin built by the Olson family.
• Waco Mammoth National Monument — 15 mi
  A bone bed on the Bosque River where a nursery herd of at least 19 Columbian mammoths was trapped and drowned by floodwater 65,000 to 72,000 years ago, left in place under a dig shelter.
• Waco Suspension Bridge — 19 mi
  A Brazos crossing opened in January 1870 as the longest single-span suspension bridge west of the Mississippi, tolled until 1889, closed to vehicles in 1971 and now walked.
• Dr Pepper Museum — 19 mi
  The 1906 bottling plant of the Artesian Manufacturing and Bottling Company, built where Dr Pepper outgrew a Waco drugstore soda fountain, now the Dr Pepper Museum.

More markers nearby

• Original Site of Valley Mills — 3.0 mi
• Lowry Hampton Scrutchfield — 6.0 mi
• China Spring Cemetery — 6.3 mi
• China Spring Tabernacle — 6.9 mi