Vigo Park Methodist Church

Vigo Park lies between Palo Duro and Tule canyons, on 4,420 acres the Indiana-Texas Land Company bought from the JA Ranch. Its post office opened in 1907 under the name Vio and became Vigo Park the next year. A school opened in 1918 and closed in 1947, and for a time the community had its own doctor. Irrigation wells let farmers make a living from the soil, and a feedlot opened in 1925. The town counted forty people in 1940 and thirty-one from 1984 through 2000, and residents restored the old schoolhouse as a community center.

What the plaque says

Vigo Park Methodist Church The Indiana-Texas Land Company planted a town at this site in 1906, naming it for adjoining counties in western Indiana. It was to be a shipping point on a new railroad line. C. R. Gardner and J. C. Stitt of Terre Haute, Indiana, built a 2-story hotel and store for the firm, and then decided to settle here. Other settlers soon arrived to join them. Methodist minister G. R. Fort crossed Tule Canyon and drove 22 miles to welcome the settlers. In June, 1907, he held a revival in a tent and organized this church. Charter members included the Crawley, Derr, Doughty, Gardner, Hay, Hedges, Hunt, Hyatt, Montgomery, Merrill, Pietzscht, Webster, and Welker families. Gardner, John Welker, and the minister visited the neighboring ranches and secured donations of money and labor to erect a church building. Trustees W. B. Doughty, Joe Hastings, and Jim Montgomery bought two lots at this site and hauled building materials from Tulia, while volunteers helped Gardner and Stitt with the construction. The church was the town's second building. For many years it was the only church in a 20-mile radius. It helped sustain Vigo Park when the railroad failed to materialize, and is still important in the life of the community. (1976)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lighthouse Trail — 23 mi
  The park's most walked trail, 2.8 miles each way across the canyon floor to the Lighthouse, a hoodoo of Triassic sandstone balanced on a pedestal of softer red shale.
• TEXAS Outdoor Musical — 23 mi
  A summer pageant of Panhandle settler life staged since 1966 in the Pioneer Amphitheater, built into a basin of Palo Duro Canyon below a 600-foot cliff.
• Palo Duro Canyon State Park — 25 mi
  The upper end of the canyon the state bought in 1933, where CCC crews built the road to the floor and the army burned the winter camps of the Comanche, Kiowa and Cheyenne in 1874.
• Caprock Canyons State Park & Trailway — 30 mi
  Red canyons below the Caprock escarpment where the Texas State Bison Herd, descended from calves Mary Ann Goodnight saved in 1878, has right of way on the park roads.

More markers nearby

• Archeological Sites at Mackenzie Reservoir and Tule Canyon — 7.9 mi
• Hamblen Drive — 11 mi
• Two Miles North of Here — 12 mi
• The S.P. Hamblen Family — 15 mi