DUANE
Duane's take
The official marker tells this one, and I'm just the voice carryin' it down the road. Now settle in, because not every story needs a gunfight to be worth tellin'. Sometimes the story is stone and glass and the kind of beauty that stops you cold on a Sunday morning.
We're talking about the Highland Park Methodist Church Building in Dallas County — and friend, this place was built to impress. The property itself was annexed by the town of Highland Park back in 1923, and then just a few years later, in 1926, something remarkable went up on that ground. Architects Roscoe DeWitt and Mark Lemmon — two names worth remembering — designed what the marker calls a splendid example of Gothic Revival architecture.
Now that phrase gets tossed around, but let me tell you what it actually means here. It means a majestic bell tower. It means forty-eight bells — forty-eight — hanging in a carillon, waiting to fill the air.
It means slender buttresses climbing the exterior like something that wandered in from a medieval dream. And those windows. Elegant stone tracery on pointed arch stained glass windows.
The kind of light that doesn't just come through glass — it arrives. The original structure was so well-conceived that when they built large harmonious additions between 1950 and 1961, the whole thing still held together, still sang the same note. That word harmonious is doing a lot of work in the marker, and it earned every bit of it.
DeWitt and Lemmon designed a building that could grow without losing itself. Forty-eight bells, pointed arches, buttresses reaching skyward — all of it standing in Highland Park, Dallas County, right where it has been since 1926. Some things are just built to last.
What the marker says
This splendid example of Gothic Revival architecture was designed by architects Roscoe DeWitt and Mark Lemmon and built in 1926. It features a majestic bell tower that houses a 48-bell carillon, elegant stone tracery on pointed arch stained glass windows, and slender buttresses. Large harmonious additions to the original structure were built between 1950 and 1961. The property was annexed by the town of Highland Park in 1923. RTHL - 1994