Chatfield United Methodist Church

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Way out in Navarro County, the story of the Chatfield United Methodist Church goes back further than most folks might reckon, all the way to 1846. That's when a preacher by the name of Reverend J.

E. Ferguson came through this stretch of Texas, carrying the Methodist word to whoever would listen. Now, the marker makes a point of mentioning that Reverend Ferguson's son would one day become a governor of Texas.

It doesn't say which governor, just that the son would rise that high. Sometimes a detail like that hangs in the air and does its own work. A preacher riding the circuit in 1846, and a governor waiting somewhere down the family line.

You file that away and keep going. A man named Robert Hodge had founded Chatfield, and Hodge was the kind of man who made things happen with what he had. He built a brush arbor, and he opened up his spring, and he let camp meetings be held right there on his land.

That's hospitality in the truest frontier sense of the word. Then in 1858, Hodge went a step further and donated a site for a lodge hall. And here's the part worth savoring: all faiths worshipped there, for years.

Not just one congregation, not just the Methodists who'd been meeting at his spring. All faiths. That lodge hall held them all.

The Methodists eventually got a place to call their own in 1886, when Mr. and Mrs. Nail McMullan gave them a dedicated site for a church. Their own building, their own ground.

The congregation grew, and it kept on growing, and by 1896, under Reverend George Clark, it reached what the marker calls peak membership. The high-water mark. Then comes the part that'll sober you right up.

In 1937, a storm destroyed the original building. The structure that traced its roots back through all those years of camp meetings and donated land and rising membership, gone in a storm. But the congregation didn't scatter.

The present building was completed in 1938. One year. They came back in one year.

That's the Chatfield United Methodist Church, and that's the kind of roots that don't pull easy from the ground.

What the marker says

In 1846, the Rev. J. E. Ferguson, whose son was to be a governor of Texas, preached to Methodists in this area. Robert Hodge, who founded Chatfield, built a brush arbor and let camp meetings be held at his spring. In 1858 he donated a site for a lodge hall, where all faiths worshipped for years. In 1886, Mr. and Mrs. Nail McMullan gave the Methodists a site for a church of their own. Peak membership came in 1896 under the Rev. George Clark. The original building was destroyed by a storm in 1937; the present one was completed in 1938. (1976)