Wesley Chapel A. M. E. Church

The church sits in what was once called Colored Town, now the Dunbar neighborhood, where formerly enslaved people and tenant farm families settled after the war. The AME church had been barred from operating in Texas before the war, and its first missionary reached Galveston in 1866. Nearby, the 1873 Calaboose jail later hosted USO and lodge meetings for Black residents, and a strip along what is now Martin Luther King Jr. Drive held Black-owned restaurants, barbershops, groceries and a skating rink. Many residents moved away in the 1960s and 1970s, and researchers are still asking why.

What the plaque says

Wesley Chapel A. M. E. Church traces its history to 1875, and is believed to be the oldest African American congregation in San Marcos. the first church building was erected on this site in 1879, and later was replaced by a succession of structures. The church operated a Freedmen's school for former slaves and their children in the 1870s, and has continued to support numerous community and charitable endeavors through the years. It remains an important part of the history of San Marcos and Hays County. (1992)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Spring Lake and the Meadows Center — 1.2 mi
  The headsprings of the San Marcos River, among the longest-inhabited places in North America, once an amusement park with a swimming pig and now seen from glass-bottom boats.
• Gruene Historic District — 14 mi
  A cotton town on the Guadalupe that the boll weevil emptied, rescued in the 1970s by a kayaking architecture student, with a dance hall that says it has never closed.
• Lockhart Courthouse Square — 16 mi
  A cotton-era courthouse town named the Barbecue Capital of Texas, built near the 1840 Plum Creek fight that followed the killing of Comanche leaders at peace talks.
• Sophienburg Museum and Archives — 17 mi
  The hilltop where Prince Carl of Solms-Braunfels raised the Adelsverein's headquarters in 1845, now the museum and archive of the German colony that became New Braunfels.

More markers nearby

• Eddie Durham — steps away
• Ulysses Cephas — steps away
• The Courthouses of Hays County — 0.3 mi
• Founding of the First Methodist Church — 0.3 mi