Sherman Chapel Missionary Baptist Church

The Texas Freedom Colonies Project lists the Ridge, also called Freedman's Ridge, as a community founded after the Civil War by emancipated people, with Pleasant Hill CME, founded in 1870, as its focal point. The Port Bolivar Iron Ore Railway was built through the community in 1911. Gregg County's genealogy site, drawing on a 1932 Texas Louisiana Baptist Association publication, dates Sherman Chapel's organization to 1872 under Rev. Daniel Sherman and lists later pastors, among them S. Brown, Green Jones and Saul Jones, who organized the Sunday School in 1889.

What the plaque says

Sherman Chapel Missionary Baptist Church Following emancipation, many African American congregations were founded in East Texas in the 1870s. As freedmen, they wanted their own places to worship in their own communities. Established in the Judson community in 1870, Sherman Chapel Missionary Baptist Church was organized with support from Reverend Daniel Sherman. In the early years, the church building was shared with the Pleasant Hill Colored Methodist Episcopal Church (later named Christian Methodist Episcopal Church) until each congregation could construct a sanctuary. The first location was on Freedmen's Ridge near Omega in northeastern Gregg County, a community formed after the Civil War for emancipated slaves. In the early 1940s, Sherman Chapel Congregation briefly relocated to a site one-quarter mile north of here to a place known as "in the pines." After a fire destroyed the building in 1945-46, the church congregation began to search for a new home. In 1947, land was purchased on State Highway 26 which was later renamed Highway 259, and construction of a sanctuary began. The church commemorated the building's completion on March 9, 1952, when they began their annual church anniversary celebration. In the 1980s, the sanctuary was rebuilt on the same lot due to the widening of the highway. For more than a century, Sherman Chapel Missionary Baptist Church Members have nurtured, educated and fostered spiritual growth in the community with leadership and support. Throughout the decades and sometimes jarring changes, the congregation has remained a spiritual beacon for the families of the area. (2015)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• East Texas Oil Museum — 18 mi
  A Kilgore College museum that rebuilds the 1930s oil boom in a full-scale Boomtown with a general store, drugstore and newspaper office, plus dioramas, films and antiques given by East Texans.
• Starr Family Home State Historic Site — 23 mi
  Maplecroft, the 1871 Greek Revival house Frank Starr built in Marshall, with Ruth Starr Blake's glass and china, an 1880s kitchen restored in 2019 and a retirement home built for a formerly enslaved person.
• Texas and Pacific Railway Depot and Museum — 23 mi
  The only surviving building of the Texas and Pacific shops at Marshall, a 1912 Mission Revival depot saved from demolition in the 1990s, still an Amtrak stop, with a railway museum and a Mikado locomotive.
• Harrison County Historical Museum — 23 mi
  Galleries in Marshall's 1901 courthouse that run from the Caddo to the present, with Wiley College, Lady Bird Johnson's inaugural gown and a military gallery across the square in Memorial City Hall.

More markers nearby

• First Baptist Church of Judson — 2.1 mi
• Summerfield Methodist Church — 2.6 mi
• Elmira Chapel Cumberland Presbyterian Church — 4.5 mi
• Wartime Home Industry — 5.9 mi