Duffau Baptist 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 Erath County, on a Sunday, October the sixth, 1878, three elders gathered with seventeen souls and decided to make something permanent. Elder A.

W. Elledge, Elder O. W.

Hughart, and Elder D. Shipman, those were the men who set the cornerstone of what would become Duffau Baptist Church. Seventeen charter members.

Not a crowd by any measure, but then, the most stubborn roots tend to start small. Elder Elledge took on the first pastorship, and he worked it the way a lot of frontier preachers did, coming around one Saturday and one Sunday a month to hold services, which meant when he showed up, people showed up. And before long, those same members furnished the material themselves and raised a sanctuary right here on this very site.

Their own hands. Their own lumber. Now, that first building stood for decades.

It saw generations come through its doors, watched the community grow, watched families plant themselves in this ground. Then 1935 arrived, and fire took it. Just like that, the building was gone.

But the congregation wasn't. They completed a new facility, and they kept going. At its peak, membership climbed to around a hundred and twenty-five.

A hundred and twenty-five people, out here in a place most maps barely bother with. Then 1960 came, and Duffau School consolidated with Hico, and the settlement began to decline, as settlements sometimes do when the school goes. The people scattered.

The numbers thinned. And yet, when that marker was put to words in 1979, this church was still standing, still holding, still the only active church in the area. Started by three elders and seventeen believers on a Sunday morning in 1878, survived a fire, survived a consolidation, survived the slow drift of a community pulling away.

Still there. Some roots, it turns out, go too deep to pull.

What the marker says

On Sunday, October 6, 1878, elders A. W. Elledge, O. W. Hughart, and D. Shipman began this fellowship with 17 charter members. Elder Elledge served as the first pastor, conducting services on one Saturday and Sunday of each month. Soon after organizing, members furnished material and erected a sanctuary at this site. After a fire destroyed that building in 1935, this facility was completed. The membership reached about 125 before Duffau School consolidated with Hico in 1960 and the settlement declined. This is the only active church. (1979)