Cedar Creek Community

Duane's take

Here's my telling of what the official marker has to say about the Cedar Creek Community, up in Washington County. Pull over if you can, because this one's a quiet story, but it's got some weight to it. Halfway between San Felipe de Austin and the town of Washington, there was once a little place called Cedar Creek.

Not a town, exactly. More of a gathering. A community of Methodists who settled in sometime in the mid-1830s and made that stretch of Texas their own.

They built something out there, a center for the Texas Methodist Episcopal Church, a place where folks came together around faith and fellowship and, more than likely, a good cold spring. Now here's the part worth leaning into. In 1849, it was the Cedar Creek Community itself that founded Chappell Hill.

They didn't just occupy the land, they shaped what came after. The Chappell Hill M.E. Church grew up out of that effort and became the hub of Methodism in central Texas.

That's not nothing. That's a community planting a seed that outgrew the hand that planted it. And that's more or less what happened.

Cedar Creek folded into the town of Chappell Hill, two miles south of the old camp meeting site, and by the time the Civil War had come and gone, the land had reverted to farmland. The community was gone. The town it founded was thriving.

Today the site sits on private property, north of the Chappell Hill Masonic Cemetery. Most folks drive right past without a second thought. But if you knew where to look, you'd find the rocks still laid around the community spring, right where Cedar Creek's Methodists left them.

Some things, it turns out, outlast the people who placed them.

What the marker says

CEDAR CREEK COMMUNITY Located halfway between San Felipe de Austin and the town of Washington, Cedar Creek existed from the mid-1830s to the early 1850s. Cedar creek was inhabited by Methodists and became the center for the Texas Methodist Episcopal Church. In 1849, Chappell Hill was founded by the Cedar Creek Community. Chappell Hill M.E. Church became the hub of Methodism in central Texas. The community folded into the town of Chappell hill two miles south of the Cedar Creek Camp meeting site. The land reverted to farmland by the end of the civil war. Today, the site is on private property north of the Chappell Hill Masonic Cemetery. Rocks laid around the community spring are still visible. (2014)