Simmons Hill Baptist Church

The association that shows up in this church's 1869 minutes was an old one. The Baptist History Homepage says the Soda Lake Baptist Association was organized in December 1847 at Border Church in Harrison County, with Border, Eight Mile, Macedonia and Henderson as its first churches. It spread across parts of nine counties and counted about forty churches before 1861. The page calls Soda Lake the mother of the associations in East Texas, adding that a Liberty Association to its west was formed chiefly from its churches. Samuel Herrin was its first moderator.

What the plaque says

Simmons Hill Baptist Church This church traces its origins to the 1850s at a site near the Upshur County line, which gave the church its first name of County Line Baptist Church. Minutes from an 1869 meeting of the Soda Lake Association show that Pastor W. W. Lee was leading 58 members. The church joined the Liberty Baptist Association in 1902. About 1915, the church began meeting in the Simmons School House. After the school consolidated with Harleton in 1939, William Hartwell Simmons, in 1941, deeded the property to the B. M. A. Baptist church of Simmons community. The congregation remodeled the schoolhouse and changed names to Simmons Hill Baptist Church in 1944. The church, which built a new sanctuary in 1996, continues to serve as a beacon of light in the area. (2011)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Daingerfield State Park — 19 mi
  A pine-and-hardwood park built in 1935-39 by a white and a Black Civilian Conservation Corps company, with a dammed lake, Bass Lodge and a 2.4-mile loop trail around the water.
• Jefferson Historical Museum — 20 mi
  A four-floor museum in Jefferson's 1888-90 federal post office and courthouse, with rooms for African-American history, Jewish heritage, the Caddo and Diamond Bessie, bought by the historical society in 1965 for $8,100.
• Excelsior House Hotel — 20 mi
  A brick-and-timber hotel at 211 West Austin that began as a river captain's boarding house in 1858 and was revived by a garden club in 1959, and still takes guests with rosewood furniture.
• Texas and Pacific Railway Depot and Museum — 22 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.

More markers nearby

• Walnut Creek Baptist Church — 3.2 mi
• Port Bolivar & Iron Ore Railroad — 4.8 mi
• Murry Institute — 4.8 mi
• Site of the Guarantee State Bank — 4.8 mi