Second Baptist Church of Seguin

The church's second pastor had a congregation and a business of his own. Hiram Wilson set up a pottery at Capote, southeast of Seguin, in 1869, where he was the first pastor of the Capote Baptist Church, founded by Ilsley, and started a school. H. Wilson and Company, one of the rare Black-owned potteries in the nineteenth-century South, made only salt-glazed ware and marked every vessel with its name. Amid postwar hostility reported by Freedmen's Bureau officers, two attacks on the Wilsons were recorded in 1867. The company closed about the time of Hiram's death in 1884.

What the plaque says

Second Baptist Church of Seguin Following the Civil War, freedmen and their families settled in communities and sought out a place to educate their children and a place of worship. The reverend Leonard Ilsley, a native of Maine, came to Seguin before the Civil War and remained after the war to assist the freedmen community. He helped organize several freedmen churches in the county, performed dozens of marriage ceremonies, and financed the building of a male dormitory at Guadalupe College. On November 16, 1865, Rev. Ilsley met with a small group of freedmen and freedwomen in Seguin and organized the second Baptist Church of Seguin. The congregation eventually settled in to a small concrete and adobe building on East Court and South Bauer Streets known as the Andrew Neill Church House. Rev. Ilsley preached and provided pastoral leadership until Hiram Wilson was appointed pastor in 1867. Prior to emancipation, Hiram Wilson and his brothers were slaves of a presbyterian minister. Under Rev. Wilson's leadership, the church purchased property at its current location on S. Guadalupe Street in 1874 and built a building for worship and a school. Membership included several Buffalo Soldiers, successful business owners, and educators, including William Ball, who co-organized the Abraham Lincoln School and served as principal. Ball served as pastor of the second Baptist Church from 1884 to 1920. born in a time of turbulence and turmoil, the Second Baptist Church of Seguin has been a beacon of safety, hope and faith for the African American Community of Seguin for well over 150 years. (2017)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sophienburg Museum and Archives — 13 mi
  The hilltop where Prince Carl of Solms-Braunfels raised the Adelsverein's headquarters in 1845, now the museum and archive of the German colony that became New Braunfels.
• Gruene Historic District — 14 mi
  A cotton town on the Guadalupe that the boll weevil emptied, rescued in the 1970s by a kayaking architecture student, with a dance hall that says it has never closed.
• Spring Lake and the Meadows Center — 23 mi
  The headsprings of the San Marcos River, among the longest-inhabited places in North America, once an amusement park with a swimming pig and now seen from glass-bottom boats.
• Natural Bridge Caverns — 24 mi
  The largest known cavern in Texas, found in 1960 by four college cavers under a ranch family's land, entered beneath a 60-foot limestone bridge and still growing.

More markers nearby

• Colonel John Ireland — 0.4 mi
• Guadalupe County, C.S.A. — 0.4 mi
• Black Education in Seguin — 0.4 mi
• Riverside Cemetery — 0.5 mi