Site of Bruceville Methodist Church

The mother town is the one that vanished. Mastersville, about seventeen miles southwest of Waco, was settled before the Civil War and got a post office in February 1868 under postmistress Mollie Rutherford. By the early 1880s it had a flour mill, two steam cotton gins, a general store, two groceries, two churches, a school and about 250 residents. When the Katy bypassed it in 1882 and founded Bruceville two miles south, people and businesses followed, and the post office was discontinued in 1887 and relocated. Thomas Hudson Barron died here in 1874, at his daughter's home.

What the plaque says

Site of Bruceville Methodist Church According to local tradition this congregation traces its beginning to the Cedar Bridge Methodist Church, which held services just prior to the Civil War in a sanctuary near a cedar bridge constructed by pioneer settler E.T. Cox. Members of Cedar Bridge Methodist reportedly organized a Methodist church in nearby Mastersville in 1863. Local tradition claims the 1863 Mastersville Methodist Church is the parent church of Bruceville Methodist Church. The earliest record of Mastersville Methodist is an 1865 notice of Rev. J.L. Crabb's selection as pastor. Soon after the Missouri, Kansas, and Texas railroad extended its track through here in 1881 many of Mastersville's citizens and businesses moved to be near railroad. The town which developed was officially named Bruceville with the granting of a post office in 1887. It was named for Dr. Lucien N. Bruce, on whose land the railroad depot was built. The first Bruceville Methodist Church sanctuary was built sometime during the 1880s. A new church building, erected at this site in 1895, served the congregation until 1983 when Bruceville Methodist Church merged with the nearby Eddy Methodist Church. The Bruceville Methodist Church building was later razed. (1994)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Mother Neff State Park — 14 mi
  A Leon River park that grew from six acres Isabella Neff left the state in her 1921 will, where Civilian Conservation Corps Company 817 built a stone tower, a pavilion and roads in the 1930s.
• Armstrong Browning Library — 17 mi
  A three-story Italian Renaissance library on the Baylor campus built to hold A. J. Armstrong's Browning collection, dedicated in December 1951 and now, by its own account, the world's largest of Browning material.
• Temple Railroad and Heritage Museum — 17 mi
  The Santa Fe depot of 1911 in a railroad town that began in 1880 as a construction camp, now a museum with locomotives and cars parked beside the active rail yard.
• Dr Pepper Museum — 17 mi
  The 1906 bottling plant of the Artesian Manufacturing and Bottling Company, built where Dr Pepper outgrew a Waco drugstore soda fountain, now the Dr Pepper Museum.

More markers nearby

• Bruceville Baptist Church — steps away
• Martin Irons — 0.4 mi
• First Baptist Church of Eddy — 2.1 mi
• Roy Bedichek — 2.8 mi