Pilot Point Church of Christ

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll let it speak for its own worth. Now, some stories start with a bang: gold strikes, gunfights, rivers rising overnight. This one starts quieter than that, out on the north Texas prairie, with a handful of people who'd come looking for something to hold onto.

The Peters Colony had begun settling this stretch of Denton County country twenty years before a congregation finally organized here at Pilot Point, about 1865, if you're keeping count. Twenty years of putting down roots before those roots grew into something with a name and a purpose. That tells you something about the patience a place demands of its people.

Then 1874 rolls around, and the church deacons make it official in the way that matters out here: they purchase land. George W. and Alice B. Merchant are the ones who sell it to them, right here at this very site.

One year later, under the supervision of a man named A. W. Cooke, a one-room frame chapel goes up.

Just the one room, mind you. But anybody who's ever built anything from nothing knows that the first room is the whole world until you're ready for the second one. And they did get ready; additions to that structure were completed later, the congregation growing into the space it had dared to imagine.

Now here's the part that I think deserves a beat of silence before we move on. This church didn't just tend its own flock. In 1959, nearly a century after those first members organized, it was instrumental in forming a brand new congregation down the road in Aubrey, seven miles south.

Seven miles. Close enough to be neighbors, far enough to need a church of their own. That's the long game, friend.

Organized about 1865, still sendin' roots outward in 1959. Some things you build in a year. Some things you build across a lifetime.

And some things just keep on building.

What the marker says

This congregation organized about 1865, twenty years after members of the Peters Colony began settling here. In 1874 the church deacons purchased land at this site from George W. and Alice B. Merchant. A one-room frame chapel was constructed here the following year under the supervision of A. W. Cooke. Additions to the structure were completed later. Active in the support of many programs, the church was also instrumental in the formation of a congregation in the nearby community of Aubrey (7 miles south) in 1959. (1981)