Willingham Spring Baptist Church

Pioneer Buildings of Texas, as Clay Coppedge reports in Texas Escapes, uses this church as an example of how plain western Protestant churches were: no steeple and little or no ornament. Coppedge says the community took its name from Archibald Willingham, who moved his family here from Salado Springs, and that Wilson Willingham, Archibald's grandson, gave the land. The simple wooden building went up between 1911 and 1914 and doubled as the one-room school of the Willingham Springs Common School District, which later consolidated with Salado's.

What the plaque says

Willingham Spring Baptist Church Willingham Springs Baptist Church was organized in 1911 with the aid of Brother Cullam, pastor of Prairie Dell Methodist Church. Local farmer Wilson Willingham deeded property on this site. Oral history relates that Hanna Elizabeth "Grandma" Kidd Myers drove the first nail in the new church building. Area farmers Jim and Bennie Brooks, John and Zola Kidd Lankford, Mart and Minnie Brinegar Van Dyke, H. L. and Clemie Kidd Thomas, and Author and Eula Housewright helped build the structure, which was completed in 1914 and also served as a community schoolhouse until 1937. The church was closed in 1941, but was revitalized in the early 1950s and again in the 1990s. (1998)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Williamson County Courthouse — 20 mi
  The fifth Williamson County courthouse, a Beaux Arts building by C. H. Page, rises over a Georgetown square of more than 50 Victorian-era buildings.
• Temple Railroad and Heritage Museum — 20 mi
  The Santa Fe depot of 1911 in a railroad town that began in 1880 as a construction camp, now a museum with locomotives and cars parked beside the active rail yard.
• Inner Space Cavern — 22 mi
  A Georgetown cave found in 1963 when highway engineers drilled test holes, holding Pleistocene fossils and 72-degree rooms that visitors reach by an artificial tunnel.
• Balcones Canyonlands National Wildlife Refuge: Doeskin Ranch — 34 mi
  A free federal refuge north of Lake Travis kept for two songbirds that need old juniper and oak, with trails at the Doeskin Ranch unit near Bertram.

More markers nearby

• Home of Elijah Sterling Clack Robertson — 4.9 mi
• Mary Elizabeth Carpenter, Birthplace of White House Aide — 4.9 mi
• Main Street Bridges — 5.2 mi
• Salado — 5.2 mi