Church minutes and camp meeting notices

The history of religion in Texas is a subject that tends to arrive in Denton County houses by two roads at once: through a family Bible with a name and a date in it, and through a page of a county newspaper that nobody remembered to keep. Between those two roads sits almost everything you can know about how the churches of the Blackland Prairie were founded, argued over and recorded. This article follows the way that record was made, from the first circuit riders who preached at Pecan Point in 1815 to the printed notices that carried the news of a revival to families who could not attend one.

What the camp meetings were, and why they left notes

Camp meetings became the organising form of early Texas religious life, and the Handbook of Texas entry on religion is careful about what they were. Methodists, Baptists and Cumberland Presbyterians depended heavily on protracted meetings that could last two to four weeks, with evangelists playing on emotion and penitents sometimes overcome by excitement. A Houston meeting in the fall of 1845 drew the criticism that no pen or tongue could give an adequate description of what the writer called riotous scenes, and that the participants called it revival. For the record keeper, the meetings matter because they were events with dates and places. They brought neighbours together, gave isolated families a social occasion, and produced the registers, membership rolls and class lists that later became the paperwork of a congregation. The Handbook of Texas entry on religion notes that these gatherings served religious and social needs at the same time, including for women whose daily routine was monotonous and exacting. A camp meeting that lasted three weeks in one place is therefore a dateable thing in a family's year, and often the only one.

Circuits, riders and the gaps they left

Methodists and Presbyterians kept congregations in touch with one another through itinerant preachers, or circuit riders, and the system had a cost. It let a small number of trained clergymen serve many isolated communities and extended denominational influence a long way, but it also let congregations put off the financial arrangements needed to support a resident pastor. Baptists, by contrast, encouraged local pastors, an aim accomplished, in the Handbook of Texas entry's blunt phrasing, all too frequently with poorly educated men or laymen. For anyone reading a church register from the 1840s or 1850s, this explains the handwriting problem before it explains anything else. Entries may have been made by a rider who visited twice a year, by a local preacher with little training, or by no one at all for a stretch of months.

What the newspapers printed that the churches did not

Religious newspapers arrived in the 1840s and 1850s and gave denominations a second kind of record. The Cumberland Presbyterians were first into the field with the Texas Presbyterian in November 1846. The Methodists followed in 1847 with the Texas Christian Advocate and Brenham General Advertiser, the Old School Presbyterians issued The Panoplist and Presbyterian of Texas in 1855, and the Baptists printed their first paper that same year under George Washington Baines, Jr., editor of the Texas Baptist. The Disciples of Christ launched the Firm Foundation in 1884. Almost all of these papers were privately owned and risky ventures. Many failed, others merged and moved to more promising towns. For Denton County research, the practical point is that a meeting notice, a revival schedule or a list of new members may survive only in print, in a paper that had no obligation to keep a copy of itself.

Where does Denton County fit into this picture?

One Denton County community shows how much a small place can hold. Stony sits on Farm Road 2622 two miles east of the Wise county line and ten miles west of Denton, in the far west of the county. It was settled in the late 1850s and named for the stony ground it stands on. Its population never exceeded fifty, probably because Justin, eight miles southwest, emerged as a shipping point for area farmers. It had a post office from 1879 to 1918. In 1884 it had a mill, a gin, four churches, two schools and a population estimated at 130. By 1890 the population had fallen to fifty. In 1914 there were 100 residents, a doctor, a blacksmith and at least two stores. From 1933 to 2000 the population was estimated at twenty-five. Four churches in a settlement of about 130 people is the whole argument for reading congregation records alongside census returns: the churches outlasted the gin and the post office, and in some cases they outlasted the town's own memory of itself.

How do you read a circuit rider's register?

Start with the structure the denomination imposed, because it produced the document. The Texas Mission grew so quickly that it was organised as an annual conference in 1840, with 1,878 members gathered in three districts and fourteen circuits served by seventeen preachers. By the time Texas joined the Union, the state had two annual conferences reporting 6,693 members and fifty-nine circuit riders aided by sixty-eight local preachers. A register from a Denton County congregation in those years will usually name the circuit before it names the church, and the preaching appointment before it names the preacher. Membership figures in the Handbook of Texas entry are also broken down by race, which matters for anyone working in a county where Black Methodists went from 1,195 to 8,360 statewide between 1846 and 1860. A name you cannot find in a white congregation's roll may be in a separate class list kept by the same preacher.

What the record does not tell you

Pull the film for the county's papers for the years your family lived here and read the church columns for one season, not one issue. Then take the names you find and look for them in the census and cemetery lists, where the same families appear in a different hand.

The other half of community life in this section is at community life in the county, and the schoolhouses that shared a district with the congregations are followed under the county's early schools.

About the source

The Handbook of Texas Online is published by the Texas State Historical Association. Its entry on religion traces the state's religious development from the Catholic missions through the arrival of Protestant denominations, camp meetings, the religious press and the churches' work in education and temperance. The association also publishes a separate entry on the Methodist Church in Texas and a short entry on Stony in Denton County. Entries carry a suggested citation and, in the Methodist entry, a bibliography of published histories.

The Blackland Chronology editorial team
contact@dentoncountyhistoricalmuseum.com