St. Matthew's Cathedral

Hudson Stuck came to Texas on a coin toss. In 1885 the London-born Englishman flipped one, heads for Australia and tails for Texas, and worked as a cowboy and schoolteacher before the priesthood. As dean of St. Matthew's from 1896, the Handbook of Texas says, his sermons and articles took up lynching and recreation grounds. He founded a night school for millworkers and a home for indigent women, and he pushed the 1903 state law against child labor. He left for Alaska in 1904 and in 1913 co-led the first complete ascent of Denali.

What the plaque says

St. Matthew's Cathedral The Rev. George Rottenstein held the first Episcopal service in Dallas in a storehouse on May 25, 1856, and organized this parish on St. Matthew's Day, Sept. 21, 1857. The Rt. Rev. Alexander Gregg, first bishop of Texas, visited Dallas in 1860 and conducted services in the Masonic Hall. In 1870 the Rev. Silas Dean Davenport led the congregation in erecting its first church building, a frame structure at Elm and Lamar. St. Matthew's became a cathedral in 1875 when the Rt. Rev. Alexander Charles Garrett, the first missionary bishop of North Texas, chose it as his see church. The growing parish moved to a new brick edifice at Commerce and Kendall in 1877, but that soon became too small. A stone cathedral at Ervay and Canton was occupied in 1895, the year the Diocese of Dallas was created, and consecrated in 1899, just 25 years after Bishop Garrett's consecration. The Rev. Hudson Stuck, benefactor of children, was then dean of the cathedral. The very Rev. Harry Tunis Moore, dean of St. Matthew's in 1907-1917, became second bishop of Dallas when Bishop Garrett died in 1924. In 1929, the congregation moved to the former St. Mary's College Chapel, at this site. By 1976, the original six-member parish numbered over 1300. (1977)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fair Park — 2.0 mi
  The State Fair of Texas grounds since 1886, where the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition left one of the country's greatest concentrations of Art Deco exposition buildings.
• African American Museum, Dallas — 2.1 mi
  Founded in 1974 at Bishop College, a free Fair Park museum holding the Sepia photograph archive, African art and A. Maceo Smith's papers, and the story of the Hall of Negro Life.
• Dallas Museum of Art — 2.2 mi
  A city art museum that began as the Dallas Art Association in 1903, grew up in Fair Park, and has stood in the Arts District since 1984 under a forty-foot barrel vault.
• Dallas Heritage Village at Old City Park — 2.5 mi
  Dallas's first city park, laid out around Browder's Spring in 1876, now a museum of historic buildings moved here from across North Texas, among them Millermore, a cotton planter's mansion.

More markers nearby

• Swiss Avenue — 0.5 mi
• William B. Lipscomb Elementary School — 0.9 mi
• Grace United Methodist Church — 1.1 mi
• Freedman's Cemetery — 1.3 mi