DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Way out in Cedar Hill, there's a church that has been through more than most. The First United Methodist Church — and friend, when I say it has seen things, I mean that literally.
This congregation got itself organized, stood up as a fellowship, and then two years later — two years — a tornado came through and took their first church clean away. Eighteen fifty-six. Gone.
Just like that. Now, you might think that'd be enough to scatter a congregation to the winds, same as the building. But no.
These folks held on. They held on for a good while, in fact, before they could put up something new. Then in eighteen eighty-three, they raised a frame building on a lot right next to where you're standing now.
That was their church. Their hard-earned, hard-won church. But time and ambition have a way of pushing forward, and by nineteen hundred they replaced it with the structure that stands to this day — stone and purpose built into one.
And what a structure it is. Off-center entry tower. Gothic detailing.
The kind of building that once upon a time you could spot from halfway across the Texas countryside and know exactly what it was and what it meant. Here's the thing that gets me though — the bell. They placed that bell in nineteen hundred, same year the building went up, and that bell is still ringing.
Still calling worshipers in. Tornado couldn't stop them. Decades couldn't stop them.
That bell just keeps on summoning. Cedar Hill heard it then. Cedar Hill hears it still.
What the marker says
The first church occupied by this congregation was destroyed by a tornado in 1856, two years after the fellowship was organized. A frame building was erected in 1883 on a lot adjacent to this site. It was replaced in 1900 by this structure. Typical of many churches that once dominated the countryside, this edifice has an off-center entry tower and Gothic detailing. The bell placed here in 1900 still summons worshipers. RTHL - 1976