Savoy Methodist Church

On May 28, 1880, a tornado struck Savoy without warning. The Handbook of Texas counts eleven dead; a 1992 Bonham Daily Favorite retrospective counts fifteen killed and sixty injured, with debris found forty miles away. The Savoy Male and Female College building stayed standing and became a refuge for the injured and the dead. The plaque says the Methodist church was one of the few buildings that survived. The town rebuilt and incorporated by 1885, but fire destroyed the college in 1890.

What the plaque says

Savoy Methodist Church This congregation traces its beginning to 1873, one year after William Savoy founded the town of Savoy on the Transcontinental (Texas & Pacific) Railroad line. Led by the Rev. James Graham, the members first met in the Roberts schoolhouse on the old Whitewright Road. They built their first sanctuary in 1876-1878, and it was one of the few buildings not destroyed when a tornado ravaged the town in 1880. A shared station with other area churches throughout its history, the Savoy church has emphasized educational and missionary activities. (1990)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sam Rayburn House State Historic Site — 8.9 mi
  The two-story farmhouse west of Bonham that the longtime Speaker of the House built in 1916 and kept as his home, left as he lived in it and open as a museum since 1975.
• Eisenhower Birthplace State Historic Site — 14 mi
  The small frame house beside the Katy tracks in Denison where Dwight Eisenhower was born in 1890, bought by townspeople in 1946 and given to Texas in 1958.
• Eisenhower State Park — 20 mi
  A bluff-top park on Lake Texoma opened in 1958 on land leased from the Corps of Engineers, in the Red River country of Fort Johnson, Colbert's Ferry and the Butterfield stages.
• Hagerman National Wildlife Refuge — 24 mi
  A 1946 refuge on the Big Mineral Arm of Lake Texoma, laid over land bought for Denison Dam and the site of the vanished railroad town of Hagerman, now a winter stop for geese.

More markers nearby

• Fort Warren — 0.8 mi
• First Baptist Church of Bells — 2.8 mi
• Carson Cemetery — 4.9 mi
• Ector Methodist Church — 5.3 mi