Sardis United Methodist Church

Sardis was a place of several faiths before it was a Methodist town. The Handbook of Texas says Allen Roe settled the area as early as 1855, and Capt. William Wade Peevey bought 414 acres in 1858. By 1891, under the name Saralvo, the community had several businesses and three churches, and in 1904 its population stood at 152. The Handbook records that in 1970 Sardis still had a grocery store, a filling station and a Methodist church. The plaque adds that the Methodists and Cumberland Presbyterians shared a frame church from 1879.

What the plaque says

Sardis United Methodist Church Methodist Church activities in this area can be traced to 1845, when the Rev. Thomas Welch, a circuit-riding minister, preached a sermon. Following a brush arbor meeting near this site in 1873, a formal congregation was organized. Services were held in a log schoolhouse until 1879, when a frame church was erected to serve the Methodist and Cumberland Presbyterian congregations. A separate Methodist Church building was completed in 1904. The Sardis United Methodist Church has been a part of Ellis County history for over one hundred years. (1986)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Ellis County Courthouse — 4.5 mi
  J. Riely Gordon's courthouse of 1897 in Pecos red sandstone and pink granite, with twenty-one carved stone faces and two cornerstones left by a quarrel over its building.
• Cedar Ridge Preserve — 14 mi
  A 633-acre Audubon Dallas preserve at the western edge of Dallas County, with about nine miles of trails through prairie, woodland and escarpment hills.
• Dallas Heritage Village at Old City Park — 25 mi
  Dallas's first city park, laid out around Browder's Spring in 1876, now a museum of historic buildings moved here from across North Texas, among them Millermore, a cotton planter's mansion.
• The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza — 25 mi
  A plow-company warehouse of 1903, identified by the Warren Commission as the building Oswald fired from, now a museum on its sixth and seventh floors above Dealey Plaza.

More markers nearby

• Sardis Cemetery — 0.6 mi
• Getzendaner Memorial Park — 3.3 mi
• First United Methodist Church of Waxahachie — 4.1 mi
• Paul Richards Park — 4.2 mi