St. Paul's United Methodist Church

Of the three men whose $150,000 gifts built this sanctuary, Walter W. Fondren had come up from the oilfield floor. Born in Union City, Tennessee, in 1877, he was orphaned at ten, learned to drill water wells in Arkansas and worked Texas farms before going to the Corsicana oilfield as a roughneck in 1897. By 1901 he was an independent operator at Spindletop. In 1911 he helped Ross Sterling organize Humble Oil, and ran its drilling and production as vice president until 1933. A Methodist and SMU trustee, he and his wife Ella gave SMU its Fondren Library.

What the plaque says

St. Paul's United Methodist Church At the beginning of the 20th century, members of Houston's Methodist community worked toward organizing a new congregation on what was then the burgeoning south end of town. In December 1905, individuals met at the J.O. Ross family home and held Christmas Eve services at the city auditorium. The congregation officially organized on January 14, 1906 with 153 charter members. Bishop Joseph Key preached the first sermon and suggested the congregation adopt St. Paul's as its name. The Ross family gave lots at the corner of Milam and McGowen streets for a new building. Designed by R.D. Steele and consecrated in January 1909. The structure reflected a Grecian design with a dome reminiscent of Byzantine architecture. The church grew along with the city of Houston, and in the late 1920s, members launched a campaign to raise money for new facilities. Jesse H. Jones, Walter Fondren and J.M. West, Sr. each contributed $150,000, and the church hired noted architect Alfred C. Finn to design a new building at the corner of Main and Binz streets. The Neo-Gothic styling features a cruciform plan on a steel-frame structure with limestone cladding. Stained glass windows from the structure, and the impressive tower houses bells also brought from the church's original sanctuary. St. Paul's church members support an array of outreach, worship, education, mission, music and caring services to the community. At the turn of the 21st century, the church is a spiritual and social community center, as well as a long-standing Houston institution. (2006)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Museum of Fine Arts, Houston — steps away
  The oldest art museum in Texas, grown from a 1900 schoolroom art league into a campus of Watkin, Mies van der Rohe and later buildings, with Ima Hogg's Bayou Bend up the bayou.
• Rothko Chapel — 0.9 mi
  An octagonal chapel open to all faiths, built by the de Menils around fourteen dark canvases by Mark Rothko, with Barnett Newman's Broken Obelisk standing in the pool outside.
• Buffalo Soldiers National Museum — 0.9 mi
  A museum in Houston's 1925 Light Guard Armory that tells the service of Black soldiers from the Revolutionary War onward, built from one veteran's thirty years of collecting.
• The Menil Collection — 1.0 mi
  John and Dominique de Menil's free museum in Montrose: a grey-sided Renzo Piano building among bungalows, holding antiquities, Surrealism and art of Oceania under natural light.

More markers nearby

• First Presbyterian Church of Houston — steps away
• W. L. and Susan Clayton — steps away
• The Garden Club of Houston — steps away
• Maurice Joseph Sullivan — steps away