Travis Avenue Baptist Church

For decades the church's growth was tied to one pastor. Wikipedia's short biography says C. E. Matthews, a former accountant and baseball player who converted in his early thirties, took Travis Avenue from fewer than fifty members to more than three thousand over about thirty years, beginning in the 1920s. He later directed evangelism for the Southern Baptist Home Mission Board. The same entry says he urged Baptist associations to include Baptist groups regardless of race or color. In 2011 the Texas House honored the church's hundredth anniversary.

What the plaque says

Travis Avenue Baptist Church A Sunday school was started in 1908 in this development outside the city limits. The group became a Mission of the College Avenue Baptist Church, established in 1905 (about 3 Mi. N). By 1910 72 Mission participants were meeting in the Prairie Chapel School. In 1911 18 members formed the Southside Baptist Church and moved a building here in 1913. By 1915 the membership had grown to 231. The Church name changed to Travis Avenue Baptist in 1920 and a new sanctuary was completed in 1925. The church now serves a large area of Fort Worth, and sponsors several outreach ministries. Texas Sesquicentennial 1836-1986.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame — 3.3 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.
• Kimbell Art Museum — 3.5 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.
• Tarrant County Courthouse — 3.6 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.
• Fort Worth Stockyards — 5.8 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

• Elizabeth Boulevard — 0.7 mi
• Southwest Baptist Theological Seminary — 1.6 mi
• First Hundred Years of Texas Christian University — 1.6 mi
• Fort Worth Zoological Park — 1.9 mi