St. Andrews United Methodist Church of Fort Worth

The yellow-brick church at 522 Missouri Avenue was built for a different congregation. Dallas architect James E. Flanders designed it about 1904 for Missouri Avenue Methodist, and the result leans Sullivanesque: a hipped roof broken by towers and turrets of different heights, a rusticated stone base, and an entrance porch that curves between two towers. A blockier three-story education annex followed around 1915. Flanders, who came to Dallas in 1876, also redesigned Texas Hall on the old Trinity University campus and drew the Navarro and Shackelford county courthouses. The building is a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark.

What the plaque says

St. Andrews United Methodist Church of Fort Worth St. Andrews United Methodist Church of Fort Worth In 1888, under the leadership of the Rev. James W. Moore, 15 men and women organized the St. Andrews Methodist Episcopal Church. The church rehabilitated a building on Ninth Street and within a decade had a parsonage for its minister. Church programs, including a youth ministry, grew, and the congregation bought a larger structure on Rosedale, offering space for Southside Public School to hold classes. At the beginning of the 20th century, the congregation purchased a new parsonage and organized a Ladies Aid Society. The society's first president was Gracie Echols; she and the women's group worked to furnish the parsonage and raise funds for the ever-growing church, which continued to need room for expansion. Other fund-raising efforts included church bazaars, and the congregation added pews, pipe organ and pulpit furniture. In 1950, St. Andrews Methodist Church purchased the Missouri Avenue Methodist Church building, designed in 1904 by acclaimed Dallas architect James E. Flanders. The St. Andrews congregation held its first services in the yellow brick church in 1951. Over the years, church members have been strong supporters of education in the community and, early on, church facilities provided classroom space for an early black public school. A longtime minister and leader of the church, the Rev. Leonard L. Haynes, became the first African American to serve on the Tarrant County Junior College Board of Trustees, as it began its integration process in the mid to late 1960s. Church members have served as principals, nurses, doctors and civil rights leaders in Fort Worth. The congregation became the St. Andrews United Methodist Church in 1972, when churches nationwide merged into the United Methodist Church. With more than 100 years of service, St. Andrews has led its community through education, music, mission and worship. (2002)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Tarrant County Courthouse — 1.5 mi
  A pink-granite courthouse of 1895 on the bluff where the Army set up Fort Worth in 1849, in a county named for the man who led the 1841 attack on the Native villages of Village Creek.
• Kimbell Art Museum — 2.8 mi
  Louis Kahn's cycloid-vaulted museum of 1972, built from Kay Kimbell's bequest and joined in 2013 by Renzo Piano's pavilion for the exhibitions the Kahn galleries could not hold.
• National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame — 2.9 mi
  A hall of fame begun in Hereford in 1975 to honor rodeo women, widened in 1977 to Western heritage, and housed in Fort Worth's Cultural District since 2002.
• Fort Worth Stockyards — 3.8 mi
  The brick-street cattle market where Armour and Swift built packing plants in 1902, now a National Register district with a Coliseum, a museum and a longhorn drive twice a day.

More markers nearby

• James E. Guinn School — 0.4 mi
• Baker Funeral Home — 0.5 mi
• Beth-el Congregation — 0.5 mi
• Broadway Baptist Church of Ft. Worth — 0.6 mi