Stephenville Church of 1900

Duane's take

Here's my telling of what the official marker has to say about the Stephenville Church of 1900. Now, most buildings don't get a second life. Most of them just... go.

But this little church in Erath County had something going for it, and that something was the kind of stubbornness that tends to show up wherever Texans gather in numbers. It starts with the Reverend John William Everds. He led his Presbyterian congregation through a fundraising effort, dollar by dollar, and what they were raising toward was a church building.

The work of collecting those funds and getting the thing erected stretched across 1899 and into 1900. Now, who drew up the plans for this place? A man named William John Wilson, a local builder and a church leader himself.

So you had a congregation that believed in what they were buildin, and a designer who was one of them. That matters. What Wilson gave them was a carpenter Gothic edifice.

And if you've ever seen one of those, you know there's a particular kind of dignity to them, something delicate and upright at the same time. This one came dressed with fishscale shingling on the steeple. Picture that: little overlapping scales of wood climbing up toward the sky, each one cut just so.

The Presbyterians worshipped in that building from 1900 all the way to 1966. Then the congregation moved on, and the church sat at its original site, quiet, aging, and eventually facing something worse than age. It was threatened with demolition.

Now here is where the story turns. In 1976, rather than let that fishscale steeple come down, the community moved the church. Picked it up and carried it to the grounds of the Stephenville Historical House Museum.

Then they restored it, by community effort, the marker says. Not by one patron, not by one committee. Community effort.

A building that was nearly erased is now the thing people come to see. William John Wilson's design, the Reverend Everds' congregation's sacrifice, all of it still standing, moved but not lost. Sometimes stubbornness is just another word for love.

What the marker says

The Rev. John William Everds led his Presbyterian congregation in raising funds to erect this church, 1899-1900. It was designed by local builder and church leader William John Wilson. Fishscale shingling decorates the steeple of this carpenter Gothic edifice, occupied by the Presbyterians until 1966. Threatened with demolition at its original site, it was moved in 1976 to the grounds of Stephenville Historical House Museum and restored by community effort. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1977