Historical Marker
Webster Presbyterian Church
Seabrook, Harris County · Texas
Erected 1989
The plaque mentions astronauts in the congregation; one took its communion to the Moon. Buzz Aldrin, an elder, planned a lunar communion with his pastor, Dean Woodruff, who asked the Presbyterian stated clerk and was told a layman could serve himself there. Woodruff found a small silver chalice; the bread and wine went in flight packets. After Eagle landed in July 1969, Aldrin asked Houston for a few moments of silence, read John 15:5 from a slip and took communion. The church holds an annual Lunar Communion; in 2019 the original chalice was kept in a bank vault.
What the plaque says
Webster Presbyterian Church Growing out of a Union Sunday School established in 1892, Webster Presbyterian Church was organized by farmers who moved to Texas from the Midwest. Early members also included Japanese rice farmers. A small church building erected in 1896 was destroyed in the 1900 storm and was replaced by this structure. After the Manned Spacecraft Center was built nearby in the 1960s, a number of people associated with the space program, including astronauts, joined the congregation and worshiped in this building. Moved here in 1981, the structure is now a museum. (1989)
Where it stands
29.56800, -95.06905 · Directions
Worth the stop nearby
- Space Center Houston — 2.1 miThe visitor center of NASA's Johnson Space Center at Clear Lake, with flown capsules, a shuttle replica riding a 747, and tram tours to Mission Control and a Saturn V.
- San Jacinto Battleground State Historic Site — 13 miThe 1,200 acres of coastal prairie and marsh where the Texas Revolution ended in eighteen minutes, and the 567-foot shaft of fossil-studded limestone that has stood over them since 1939.
- Emancipation Park — 21 miThe Third Ward park that freedpeople bought for Juneteenth in 1872, rebuilt in 2017 on Emancipation Avenue and still the center of the city's June 19 celebration.
- Buffalo Soldiers National Museum — 22 miA 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.