Wesley United Methodist Church

Greenville was a village of log buildings around the courthouse square when Methodists organized here in 1850. The Handbook of Texas says the town was platted in 1846, held its first lot auction in January 1847, got a post office that year and incorporated on February 15, 1852. By the 1850s it had a general store, three taverns, three groceries, two hotels and a drug store. A Masonic hall built about 1852 served as school and church, and the Greenville Institute, a private primary school, had a building by 1850. Enslaved people grew in number from 1846 to 1860.

What the plaque says

Wesley United Methodist Church Methodists who settled in the Greenville area were served by occasional circuit preachers as early as 1848. In 1850 a Methodist congregation formally was organized with thirteen charter members. Early worship services were held in the Hunt County Courthouse and in the Masonic Lodge building. Known as the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, at Greenville until 1896, the fellowship adopted the name Wesley in that year. As Greenville's oldest organized congregation, Wesley United Methodist Church has played an important role in the town's development and heritage. (1984)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Audie Murphy / American Cotton Museum — 0.7 mi
  A Greenville museum of Hunt County's military heroes, including Audie Murphy, and of cotton, which keeps the engine of what it says was the world's largest inland cotton compress.
• Rockwall County Historical Foundation & Museum — 24 mi
  A small museum in Harry Myers Park that keeps the evidence on Rockwall's rock wall, sandstone dikes that geologists call natural and folk tales call built.
• Cooper Lake State Park — 30 mi
  Two units on Jim Chapman Lake, a Corps reservoir proposed in the late 1930s, stalled by a lawsuit until 1984 and dedicated in 1991, with a 10.5-mile equestrian trail and wildlife land around it.

More markers nearby

• Library Movement in Greenville — 0.9 mi
• Lallie P. Carlisle — 1.4 mi
• Wesley College Administration Building — 1.4 mi
• Site of Phillips Field/Majors Stadium — 1.8 mi