DUANE
Duane's take
Here's what the official marker has to say, and I'll do my best to do it justice. San Benito was only three years old when a handful of faithful folks decided their young town needed a Presbyterian church. That was 1910 — the ink barely dry on the town itself.
The very next year, 1911, they put up a frame building, humble and honest, and that little structure held the congregation through the heat and the harvests and all the ordinary business of life on the southern tip of Texas. For more than twenty years, it stood. And then came 1933.
A hurricane — and if you've ever stood on the Gulf Coast when one of those things rolls in off the water, you know there's no negotiating with it — that hurricane destroyed the building. Gone. Everything the congregation had raised up, taken down in a storm.
Now, here's where the story turns. The year after the destruction, 1934, they built again. And they didn't build small this time.
They secured funding in part from a Federal Government loan, which put this church in some uncommon company — it became known as America's first Public Works Administration church. Let that settle for a moment. Out of the wreckage of a hurricane, on the windswept edge of the Rio Grande Valley, a congregation built something the whole country hadn't seen yet.
And they built it beautifully — Mission Revival style, with those arched gable parapets reaching up like the place knew exactly what it was. Some things, it turns out, a storm can't finish.
What the marker says
This church was organized in 1910, three years after the founding of San Benito. The first building, a frame structure completed in 1911, served the congregation until a hurricane destroyed it in 1933. The following year, this building ws constructed. Funded in part by a Federal Government loan, it was known as America's first Public Works Administration church. The structure's Mission Revival style features arched gable parapets.