Trinity Church of Quanah

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and here's how I'm gonna tell it to you. Way up in Hardeman County, in the town of Quanah, there's a little church with a story that took the better part of three decades to fully unfold. Trinity Church.

And it starts, like so many Texas stories do, with a man on the move. The Right Reverend Alexander C. Garrett, first missionary bishop of northern Texas, came riding into Quanah in 1887.

No grand sanctuary waiting for him. No stained glass, no pipe organ. Just a schoolroom and a handful of local Episcopalians willing to gather and listen.

And preach to them he did. Now, you might think that's a modest beginning. You'd be right.

But modest beginnings have a way of growing into something worth consecrating. Three years after that schoolroom sermon, in 1890, a man named G. M.

Dodge stepped in. Dodge was the developer of the Fort Worth and Denver City Railroad, and he donated the property for the church building. A railroad man, gifting a parcel of Texas ground to a congregation.

The land was set. Now someone had to build on it. What they built, eventually, was a frame Victorian Gothic structure.

Not a courthouse, not a cathedral, but something with its own quiet dignity out there on the Texas plains. And that building waited for its moment. It came on December 21, 1913, when the church was consecrated, formally, officially, done.

The presiding figure that day was the Right Reverend Edward Arthur Temple, Bishop of North Texas. Two bishops bookend this story, Garrett arriving in a schoolroom in 1887, Temple presiding over the consecration in 1913. One planted a seed in borrowed space.

The other saw it sealed in wood and spire. That little Victorian Gothic church in Quanah has been standin ever since, holdin its ground in Hardeman County, and now you know exactly how it got there.

What the marker says

The Rt. Rev. Alexander C. Garrett (1832-1924), first missionary bishop of northern Texas, preached to local Episcopalians in a schoolroom when he first visited Quanah in 1887. The property for this church building was donated in 1890 by G. M. Dodge, developer of the Fort Worth & Denver City Railroad. The frame Victorian Gothic structure was consecrated on December 21, 1913, during the Episcopacy of the Rt. Rev. Edward Arthur Temple (1867-1924), Bishop of North Texas. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark-1976