West Fork United Presbyterian Church

The congregation outlasted its own neighborhood. A 2010 Dallas News story says the church, moved off the ground beside Watson Cemetery onto land given by John Santerre, now sits in a corner of the Great Southwest Industrial District that Angus Wynne began in the mid-1950s. The paper says the highway department made the church move in 1956 for what is now State Highway 360; the plaque ties a 1955 move to the turnpike. An organizer told the paper the congregation traces its roots to the La Reunion colony, a claim the plaque does not make.

What the plaque says

West Fork United Presbyterian Church In 1870 the Rev. Andrew Shannon Hayter organized the Good Hope Cumberland Sabbath School to serve the early settlers of the surrounding area. The first church building, which was also used as a schoolhouse, was located in the vicinity of the Watson Cemetery (2 mi. SW) on property donated by P.A. Watson. In 1872 the congregation adopted the name West Fork. The Church's third sanctuary, built two years after a destructive 1924 fire, was moved to this location in 1955 during construction of the Dallas-Fort Worth Turnpike. (1982)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Cedar Ridge Preserve — 11 mi
  A 633-acre Audubon Dallas preserve at the western edge of Dallas County, with about nine miles of trails through prairie, woodland and escarpment hills.
• The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza — 14 mi
  A plow-company warehouse of 1903, identified by the Warren Commission as the building Oswald fired from, now a museum on its sixth and seventh floors above Dealey Plaza.
• Dallas Museum of Art — 15 mi
  A city art museum that began as the Dallas Art Association in 1903, grew up in Fair Park, and has stood in the Arts District since 1984 under a forty-foot barrel vault.
• Dallas Heritage Village at Old City Park — 15 mi
  Dallas's first city park, laid out around Browder's Spring in 1876, now a museum of historic buildings moved here from across North Texas, among them Millermore, a cotton planter's mansion.

More markers nearby

• Ford Cemetery — 0.4 mi
• Cable Tool Rig — 1.6 mi
• Narrow Gauge Railway — 1.6 mi
• The Six Flags over Texas — 1.7 mi