This Week in Texas Methodist History  May 23, 2021

 

Dallas Methodists Place Plaque at Commerce and Lamar, Site of First Methodist Church in Dallas, May 24, 1936

 

 

The decade in which Texans were more conscious of their history as evidenced by the numerous commemorative events was the 1930s.  Previous blog entries have highlighted the Texas Methodist Centennial in 1934, the renewed interest in McMahan’s Chapel, the publication of church histories and other such events.

 

A major oil company produced a comic book history of Texas called Texas History Movies and distributed it to school children.  Secretary of Commerce and Chair of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, Jesse Jones, a member of St. Paul’s Houston, helped secure funding for the construction of the San Jacinto Monument.  The MECS conferences in Texas and the Anglo Conference of the MEC met in Houston in 1936 specifically to tour the San Jacinto Battlefield and invite members of the Fowler and Alexander families to address the conferences.  The two African American Methodist conferences of the MEC in Texas were not included in the joint activities---just like Texas History Movies, Texas Methodism embraced a vision of Texas history that excluded African Americans and allowed only a few Tejanos like Juan Seguin and Jose A. Navarro into the story.

 

I have previously written my belief that Texas Methodists tried very hard to tie their history into the Texas Revolutionary narrative. 

 

I interpret the celebrations of 1936 as an attempt to say “We are not Southern!.  We have a distinctive character of our own.”   The preceding twenty years had been hard on the South’s image---the high percentage of rejection of  WWI draftees from the South for reasons of intellectual or health disabilities was shocking.  The popular image of Southerners in such popular novels as Tobacco Road,  helped promote the image of the South was poor, backward, and not really ready to participate in the progress of the 20^th century.   The New Deal had many programs specifically focused on the South. The events of 1936 such as the erection of the San Jacinto Monument and the construction of Fair Park in Dallas were an announcement to the world---We are not Southern.  The cowboy on horseback represents us better than the barefoot tenant farmer behind a mule--Event though population and economic statistics showed otherwise.

 

It is little wonder that Texas Methodists were eager to jump on the historical bandwagon.  One such observance occurred on Sunday afternoon May 24, 1936 in Dallas.   The Men’s Bible Class and the Dallas Historical Society placed a plaque in the wall of a building at Lamar and Commerce, the site of the first Methodist church building in Dallas.  George B. Dealey, a name well known in Dallas history, was President of the Historical Society and Adolph Wherry, President of the Sunday School Class both spoke.   The participants believed that the first church in Dallas dated to 1846 and its organization by Orrin Hatch.  Wherry published a history of church, and there were persons in attendance who had been members of the church on Lamar before it moved to Harwood---

 

Note:  This was the oldest church in Dallas, not Dallas County.  On April 24, 2021, Webb Chapel UMC in Farmer’s Branch, held its final service.  It claimed 177 years of service---back to 1844, not 1846.