Smith Point Community Church

Smith Point is known beyond its congregation as a funnel for migrating hawks. Each autumn raptors heading for Central and South America gather on this shore of Galveston Bay, and on a peak day the sky can hold thousands of Broad-winged Hawks. Volunteers began counting in 1992, and since 1997 the Gulf Coast Bird Observatory has run a full-season daily census from a thirty-foot tower in the Candy Abshier Wildlife Management Area. Before the church, the community lived by fishing and ranching, and oil arrived in 1944.

What the plaque says

Smith Point Community Church Officially organized in 1948, Smith Point Baptist Church held services once a month in the 1937 Smith Point School and community center led by traveling Baptist ministers. The school building was later sold to the church and moved to this site in 1960. Restrooms and Sunday School classrooms were added to the old school house to accommodate a growing congregation. In 1956, the church reorganized and hired its first full-time pastor, Brother C.L. Smith. In 1961, church members helped build a parsonage from Hurricane Carla wreckage. In 2007, the church was renamed Smith Point Community Church to better reflect their mission to assist the Smith Point community. (2016)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Texas Seaport Museum and the Elissa — 16 mi
  An iron barque launched in Aberdeen in 1877 that called at Galveston twice, ended up smuggling in the Adriatic, and was bought back from a Greek scrapyard to sail again from Pier 22.
• The Strand — 16 mi
  Five blocks of iron-front brick buildings near the harbor that were once called the Wall Street of the Southwest, emptied after 1900 and brought back by preservationists from the 1960s.
• 1892 Bishop's Palace — 16 mi
  Nicholas Clayton's stone house on Broadway for the railroad lawyer Walter Gresham, later home to Galveston's Catholic bishops and one of the most admired Victorian houses in the country.
• 1859 Ashton Villa — 16 mi
  A brick Italianate house on Broadway, built with enslaved labor in 1859, whose lawn has held Galveston's Juneteenth commemoration of General Orders, No. 3 every year since 1979.

More markers nearby

• Sarah Ridge Paschal Pix — 0.4 mi
• Bolivar Point — 11 mi
• Point Bolivar — 11 mi
• Fort Travis — 11 mi