Woodbury Missionary Baptist Church

Woodbury was bypassed by the rails. The Handbook of Texas says the community was established in 1857 when Carrol Witty, William R. Nunn and the Rev. Thomas Newton McKee bought property and offered it for sale. A dry goods store opened in 1869 and a post office in 1871. By 1892 the town had 200 people, two general stores, a drugstore, two blacksmith shops and a steam cotton gin and gristmill, and by 1900 the school enrolled 114 students under three teachers. Without a railroad, only 148 people and two businesses remained in 1936.

What the plaque says

Woodbury Missionary Baptist Church Organized Sept. 28, 1871, by Elder Samuel Lacy, assisted by Elder S. E. Brooks. Early members came from the Bigham, Brooks, Ezell, Posey, Reed, Rozell, Skinner, Stearnes, and Witty families. Sunday School was organized in 1902. Present building was erected 1933. (1972)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Hill County Courthouse — 6.5 mi
  Wesley C. Dodson's limestone Second Empire courthouse of 1890 on the Hillsboro square, gutted by fire on New Year's Day 1993 and rededicated in 1999 after a rebuilding that two Willie Nelson concerts helped pay for.
• Cleburne State Park — 23 mi
  A 1930s Civilian Conservation Corps park on the old Chisholm Trail crossing country, with a spring-fed lake, a hand-carved three-tiered spillway and a CCC bridge in Johnson County.
• Bosque Museum — 28 mi
  A Clifton museum holding what it calls the largest repository of Norwegian artifacts in the South and Southwest, with Bosque County finds some 10,000 years old and a log cabin built by the Olson family.
• Ellis County Courthouse — 32 mi
  J. Riely Gordon's courthouse of 1897 in Pecos red sandstone and pink granite, with twenty-one carved stone faces and two cornerstones left by a quarrel over its building.

More markers nearby

• Peoria Cemetery — 5.1 mi
• Bragg Williams Lynching — 6.5 mi
• Site of Old Lexington Village — 6.5 mi
• Hill County — 6.5 mi