Saint John Missionary Baptist Church

The Handbook of Texas places the church inside a farming valley of freed people. Mosier Valley was settled in the 1870s by twelve emancipated families, most of them taken as enslaved people from Tennessee through Missouri to a Mosier plantation. The Mosier and Lee families gave and sold them Trinity bottomland. They raised cotton and corn, kept gardens, and worked as handymen, sharecroppers and nannies in Hurst, Euless and Bedford. For a time the church, school and Masonic lodge shared one building. From about 1910 through the 1930s the valley had string bands, square dances, revivals and public festivals.

What the plaque says

Saint John Missionary Baptist Church In 1874 a small group of former slaves met at the the home of Frank Young and organized this congregation, which originally was named Oak Grove Baptist Church. During the late 19th-century pastorate of the Rev. Jim Carroll, the name was changed to St. John, and a two-story church and Masonic lodge building was constructed near this site on land donated by Tennessee Blackburn. The congregation built its own sanctuary here in 1911. Throughout its history, St. John Missionary Baptist Church has been a source of service and leadership for the Mosier Valley Community. (1986)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Tarrant County Courthouse — 13 mi
  A pink-granite courthouse of 1895 on the bluff where the Army set up Fort Worth in 1849, in a county named for the man who led the 1841 attack on the Native villages of Village Creek.
• Fort Worth Stockyards — 13 mi
  The brick-street cattle market where Armour and Swift built packing plants in 1902, now a National Register district with a Coliseum, a museum and a longhorn drive twice a day.
• Kimbell Art Museum — 15 mi
  Louis Kahn's cycloid-vaulted museum of 1972, built from Kay Kimbell's bequest and joined in 2013 by Renzo Piano's pavilion for the exhibitions the Kahn galleries could not hold.
• National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame — 15 mi
  A hall of fame begun in Hereford in 1975 to honor rodeo women, widened in 1977 to Western heritage, and housed in Fort Worth's Cultural District since 2002.

More markers nearby

• Site of Mosier Valley School — steps away
• Sloan-Journey Expedition of 1838 — 2.0 mi
• Site of Bird's Fort — 2.0 mi
• Arwine Cemetery — 2.1 mi